1929

Events in 1929 101

• 1841 – 1929 Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) Died 24 November 1929, aged 88 French statesman, known as "Le Tigre", who was Prime Minister in the last years of the First World War. He was a principal architect of the Treaty of Versailles.
• 1844 – 1929 Carl Benz (1844-1929) Died 4 April 1929, aged 84 German engineer who built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885, widely regarded as the first practical automobile. His company merged with Daimler in 1926 to form Daimler-Benz.
• 1846 – 1929 Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929) Died 29 December 1929, aged 83 German engine designer and a partner of Gottlieb Daimler. He designed the first Mercedes car of 1901 and founded the Maybach engine company.
• 1847 – 1929 Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929) Died 21 May 1929, aged 82 British Liberal statesman who was Prime Minister from 1894 to 1895 after succeeding Gladstone. He was also the first chairman of the London County Council.
• 1848 – 1929 Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) Died 13 January 1929, aged 80 American lawman and gambler of the Old West. He is best known for the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and died in Los Angeles.
• 1851 – 1929 Emile Berliner (1851-1929) Died 3 August 1929, aged 78 German-born American inventor of the gramophone and the flat disc record. He also developed an improved telephone microphone.
• 1851 – 1929 Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929) Died 20 March 1929, aged 77 French marshal and Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front in 1918. He accepted the German armistice at Compiègne, which ended the First World War.
• 1853 – 1929 Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) Died 12 February 1929, aged 75 British-American actress and society beauty, known as "the Jersey Lily". She was a mistress of the future King Edward VII. She died in Monaco.
• 1857 – 1929 Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) Died 3 August 1929, aged 72 American economist and sociologist. In The Theory of the Leisure Class he coined the term "conspicuous consumption".
• 1859 – 1929 Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) Died 28 March 1929, aged 69 American poet and Wellesley College professor. She wrote the words of "America the Beautiful".
• 1865 – 1929 Robert Henri (1865-1929) Died 12 July 1929, aged 64 American painter and teacher who led the Ashcan School of urban realism. His book The Art Spirit influenced generations of artists.
• 1866 – 1929 Aby Warburg (1866-1929) Died 26 October 1929, aged 63 German art historian and cultural theorist. His research library became the Warburg Institute in London, and his work helped found modern iconology.
• 1872 – 1929 Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) Died 19 August 1929, aged 57 Russian impresario who founded the Ballets Russes. He commissioned landmark works from Stravinsky, Picasso and Nijinsky, and died in Venice.
• 1873 – 1929 Liang Qichao (1873-1929) Died 19 January 1929, aged 55 Chinese scholar, journalist and reformer and a leader of the 1898 Hundred Days' Reform. His writings shaped modern Chinese nationalism and political thought.
• 1874 – 1929 Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) Died 15 July 1929, aged 55 Austrian poet and dramatist who wrote the libretti for several Richard Strauss operas, including Der Rosenkavalier. He co-founded the Salzburg Festival.
• 1878 – 1929 Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) Died 3 October 1929, aged 51 German statesman who served as Chancellor and then Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic. He shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize for the Locarno Treaties.
• 1929 – 1945 Anne Frank (1929-1945) Died March 1945, aged 15 Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who hid with her family in Amsterdam for two years before being discovered and deported. She died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before its liberation. Her wartime diary, published after her death, became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
• 1929 – 2022 Barbara Walters (1929-2022) Died 30 December 2022, aged 93 American broadcaster who was the first woman to anchor a network evening news programme in the United States.
• 1929 – 2024 Bob Newhart (1929-2024) Died 18 July 2024, aged 94 American comedian whose deadpan, mild-mannered delivery made him a star in stand-up and two long-running sitcoms.
• 1929 – 2021 Christopher Plummer (1929-2021) Died 5 February 2021, aged 91 Canadian actor of a seventy-year career, from The Sound of Music to an Academy Award at eighty-two for Beginners.
• 1929 – 2025 Dick Button (1929-2025) Died 30 January 2025, aged 95 American figure skater who dominated the sport in the late 1940s and early 1950s and later became its best-known television analyst.
• 1929 – 2021 Ed Asner (1929-2021) Died 29 August 2021, aged 91 American actor whose Lou Grant won seven Emmy Awards across a comedy and a drama.
• 1929 – 2021 Eric Carle (1929-2021) Died 23 May 2021, aged 91 American author and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has sold more than fifty million copies.
• 1929 – 2025 Frank Gehry (1929-2025) Died 5 December 2025, aged 96 Canadian-American architect whose sculptural, audacious buildings, among them the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, won worldwide renown.
• 1929 – 1939 Great Depression Global economic collapse The 1929 stock market crash triggered the Great Depression — a decade of mass unemployment, poverty, and political instability worldwide.
• 1929 – 2025 Joan Plowright (1929-2025) Died 16 January 2025, aged 95 English actress who won a Tony for A Taste of Honey and an Oscar nomination for Enchanted April. She was married to Laurence Olivier from 1961 until his death.
• 1929 – 2025 Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) Died 17 January 2025, aged 95 American cartoonist and writer whose strip Feiffer was celebrated for its literate, satirical captions.
• 1929 – 2022 Lata Mangeshkar (1929-2022) Died 6 February 2022, aged 92 Indian playback singer whose voice carried Hindi cinema for seven decades and who recorded in thirty-six languages.
• 1929 – 2026 Len Deighton (1929-2026) Died 15 March 2026, aged 97 English novelist who reshaped the spy story with The Ipcress File and a long run of cool, sceptical thrillers.
• 1929 Wall Street Crash Wall Street Crash The stock market crash of October 1929 triggered the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn of the 20th century.
• 1929 – 1989 Sergio Leone (1929-1989) Died 30 April 1989, aged 60 Sergio Leone was an Italian film director who pioneered the Spaghetti Western genre with films including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. His operatic visual style and collaborations with composer Ennio Morricone influenced generations of filmmakers. Once Upon a Time in America was his final completed film.
• 1929 King Alexander proclaims royal dictatorship The 6 January Dictatorship in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes King Alexander I suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament and banned political parties after the shooting of Croatian deputies in the assembly in 1928. On 3 October he renamed the state the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
• 1929 Tintin makes his first appearance Hergé's reporter debuts in Le Petit Vingtième Hergé's Tintin in the Land of the Soviets began serialisation in Le Petit Vingtième, the children's supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The young reporter and his dog Snowy went on to star in one of the best-selling comic series in the world.
• 1929 Amanullah Khan abdicates Afghan reforming king forced out by revolt Facing a rebellion against his modernising reforms, King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan abdicated and later went into exile in Italy. Habibullah Kalakani seized Kabul, but Mohammed Nadir Shah took the city in October and became king.
• 1929 – 1968 Martin Luther King Civil rights leader Dr. King led the American civil rights movement, delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
• 1929 Popeye first appears in print The sailor joins the Thimble Theatre comic strip E. C. Segar introduced Popeye the Sailor into his newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre, which was syndicated by King Features. The character quickly became the strip's star and later a major animated cartoon franchise.
• 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front published as a book Remarque's anti-war novel appears in Germany Erich Maria Remarque's novel Im Westen nichts Neues was published in book form after newspaper serialisation in 1928. It sold millions of copies in many languages within months. The Nazis later banned and burned it.
• 1929 – 2010 Jean Simmons (1929-2010) British actress who went from Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet to Hollywood epics like The Robe and Spartacus.
• 1929 – present The Vatican City State Lateran Treaty The treaty that recognized the Vatican as an independent sovereign state within Rome.
• 1929 4th Elfstedentocht Winner: Karst Leemburg — 11h 09m After twelve years without sufficient ice, the Elfstedentocht returned on 12 February 1929 with over 300 skaters facing brutal conditions — a biting east wind and temperatures between -18°C and -10°C. Karst Leemburg won in 11 hours and 9 minutes.
• 1929 Trotsky expelled from the Soviet Union Stalin's rival sent into exile in Turkey Leon Trotsky was deported from the USSR and arrived in Constantinople, then settled on the island of Büyükada. His expulsion confirmed Stalin's supremacy over the Soviet leadership. Trotsky remained in exile until his assassination in Mexico in 1940.
• 1929 – 2015 Helmut Schmidt dies German Chancellor, age 96 Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982 and one of the architects of European integration, died on November 10, 2015, aged 96.
• 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre Seven men gunned down in a Chicago garage Seven men linked to George "Bugs" Moran's North Side Gang were lined up against a garage wall on North Clark Street in Chicago and shot dead. The killings were widely attributed to Al Capone's organisation. The massacre became a defining image of Prohibition-era gang violence.
• 1929 – 1975 Graham Hill Mr. Monaco Two-time World Champion and the only driver to win the "Triple Crown of Motorsport" (F1, Indy 500, Le Mans).
• 1929 1929 World Snooker Championship Joe Davis Title 3 Winner: Joe Davis; Runner-up: Tom Dennis. Score: 19–14.
• 1929 Founding of Mexico's National Revolutionary Party Calles creates the forerunner of the PRI Former president Plutarco Elías Calles founded the Partido Nacional Revolucionario to unite Mexico's revolutionary factions. As the PRI it went on to govern Mexico without interruption until 2000.
• 1929 Herbert Hoover inaugurated as US President Hoover becomes the 31st president Herbert Hoover was sworn in as the 31st President of the United States after defeating Al Smith in the 1928 election. Months later the Wall Street Crash began the economic collapse that would define his single term.
• 1929 Hubble publishes the velocity-distance relation Evidence that the universe is expanding Edwin Hubble published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that galaxies recede at speeds proportional to their distance. The relation, now called Hubble's law, became the foundation of the expanding-universe model in cosmology.
• 1929 – 2026 Yayoi Kusama Japanese Artist Japanese contemporary artist whose immersive polka-dot installations, infinity mirror rooms and vibrant pumpkin sculptures made her one of the most celebrated and commercially successful artists in the world. Born into a seed-merchant family in Matsumoto, she began experiencing vivid hallucinations as a child — flashes of light, auras and dense fields of dots — and channelled these visions into an extraordinary body of work spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fiction and fashion. She lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo from 1977, walking to her nearby studio each morning to create. By the time of her death at 97, she was the world's top-selling living artist.
• 1929 – 2021 Jane Powell (1929-2021) American singer and actress, a star of MGM musicals, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
• 1929 – 2023 Milan Kundera Czech-French Novelist Czech-born French novelist, essayist and playwright. His novels, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, explored themes of identity, exile and the fragility of human existence under totalitarianism. Stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship after the Soviet invasion, he lived in France from 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981.
• 1929 – 2001 Nigel Hawthorne (1929-2001) Died 26 December 2001, aged 72 Hawthorne was a British actor best known as the scheming civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. On stage and screen he played the title role in The Madness of King George, earning an Oscar nomination. He came to leading roles relatively late in life.
• 1929 – 2019 Andre Previn (1929-2019) Died 28 February 2019, aged 89 Andre Previn was a German-born American conductor, pianist, and composer who led major orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra and won four Academy Awards for film scoring. He worked across classical, jazz, and film music with equal acclaim. He died at his home in New York.
• 1929 Bhagat Singh bombs the Central Legislative Assembly Revolutionaries throw bombs in Delhi and court arrest Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two low-intensity bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and scattered leaflets, shouting "Inquilab Zindabad". Nobody was killed, and they made no attempt to escape. Bhagat Singh was executed in 1931 for an earlier killing.
• 1929 – 2020 Max von Sydow (1929-2020) Died 8 March 2020, aged 90 Max von Sydow was a Swedish actor renowned for his collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, including The Seventh Seal, and later roles in The Exorcist and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He died on 8 March 2020.
• 1929 – 1959 Mike Hawthorn The Bow Tie Driver 1958 World Champion and Britain’s first-ever F1 champion.
• 1929 First Monaco Grand Prix Motor race through the streets of Monte Carlo The first Monaco Grand Prix was held on a street circuit through Monte Carlo and won by William Grover-Williams in a Bugatti. The race became one of the most famous events in motor sport.
• 1929 – 2026 Edouard Balladur (1929-2026) Died 31 August 2026, aged 97 French neo-Gaullist politician who served as prime minister from 1993 to 1995.
• 1929 – 1993 Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) Died 20 January 1993, aged 63 Audrey Hepburn, star of "Roman Holiday," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and "My Fair Lady," died of appendiceal cancer at her home in Switzerland. In her later years she devoted herself to humanitarian work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. She remains one of the most recognized actresses of Hollywood's golden era.
• 1929 – 2025 Sam Nujoma (1929-2025) Died 8 February 2025, aged 95 Leader of the SWAPO liberation movement and first president of independent Namibia, serving from 1990 to 2005.
• 1929 First Academy Awards ceremony Hollywood honours the films of 1927-28 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented its first awards at a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Wings won the top production award and Emil Jannings was named best actor. The ceremony lasted about fifteen minutes.
• 1929 Barcelona International Exposition opens World's fair on Montjuïc The International Exposition opened on the hill of Montjuïc in Barcelona. It left behind the Palau Nacional, the Magic Fountain and Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion, a landmark of modernist architecture.
• 1929 – 2024 Peter Higgs (1929-2024) Died 8 April 2024, aged 94 British physicist awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics for predicting the particle that bears his name.
• 1929 United Kingdom general election Labour becomes the largest party for the first time In the first UK election in which women aged 21 to 29 could vote, known as the Flapper Election, Labour won the most seats but no majority. Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority government on 5 June.
• 1929 Fleming publishes his discovery of penicillin Mould extract shown to kill bacteria Alexander Fleming described the antibacterial action of a Penicillium mould in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. The paper drew little attention at first. It was developed into a mass-produced antibiotic by Florey and Chain in the 1940s.
• 1929 Un Chien Andalou premieres Buñuel and Dalí's surrealist short film Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's silent short film Un Chien Andalou premiered in Paris. Its dreamlike imagery, including the notorious eye-slicing scene, made it a landmark of surrealist cinema.
• 1929 Young Plan for German reparations Experts' committee reduces Germany's reparations A committee chaired by the American businessman Owen D. Young issued its report on German First World War reparations, cutting the total and spreading payments until 1988. The German right campaigned against the plan, which gave the Nazi Party wider national publicity.
• 1929 Cristero War ends Church-state agreement ends the Mexican uprising An agreement brokered by US Ambassador Dwight Morrow between the Mexican government and the Catholic hierarchy ended the Cristero War. Public worship resumed after three years of armed revolt against anticlerical laws. The war had cost about 90,000 lives.
• 1929 – 2003 June Carter Cash (1929-2003) Died 15 May 2003, aged 73 June Carter Cash was a singer, songwriter and comedian from the Carter Family country music dynasty. She co-wrote 'Ring of Fire' and performed for decades alongside her husband Johnny Cash, who died four months after her. She won multiple Grammy Awards.
• 1929 – 2020 Milton Glaser (1929-2020) Died 26 June 2020, aged 91 Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer who created the iconic I Love New York logo and co-founded New York magazine, becoming one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. He died on 26 June 2020, his 91st birthday.
• 1929 – 2006 Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) Died 15 September 2006, aged 77 Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist and war correspondent famed for her combative interviews with world leaders, died of cancer in Florence. Her later writing on Islam and the West drew both acclaim and controversy. She remained one of the most influential Italian journalists of her generation.
• 1929 – 1999 Hassan II of Morocco (1929-1999) Died 23 July 1999, aged 70 Hassan II ruled Morocco for 38 years, surviving two assassination attempts and presiding over the annexation of Western Sahara. His reign was marked by both authoritarian repression and gradual political liberalization in its final years. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI.
• 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway Soviet forces defeat Chinese troops in Manchuria Chinese authorities in Manchuria seized the Soviet-managed Chinese Eastern Railway, which led to fighting along the border. The Soviet Special Far Eastern Army under Vasily Blyukher won decisively, and the Khabarovsk Protocol restored joint Soviet control of the line.
• 1929 – 2000 Screamin' Jay Hawkins (1929-2000) Died 12 February 2000, aged 70 Screamin' Jay Hawkins was an American rhythm-and-blues singer best known for the 1956 song "I Put a Spell on You", performed with operatic howls and macabre props including a coffin and a skull. Widely covered, the song became a standard. He is often called a forerunner of shock rock.
• 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact enters into force Treaty renouncing war takes effect The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, signed in Paris in 1928, came into force. Its signatories renounced war as an instrument of national policy, but the pact had no means of enforcement.
• 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War signed New rules for the treatment of captured soldiers Delegates in Geneva signed the Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War together with a revised convention on wounded and sick soldiers. It set out rules on the humane treatment, food and correspondence of prisoners, drawing on the failures of the First World War.
• 1929 – 1994 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994) Died 19 May 1994, aged 64 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, former US First Lady and widow of President John F. Kennedy, died of cancer in New York City. She remained one of the most recognized public figures of the 20th century.
• 1929 Graf Zeppelin flies around the world First round-the-world flight by an airship The German airship LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, commanded by Hugo Eckener, flew around the globe from Lakehurst, New Jersey, stopping at Friedrichshafen, Tokyo and Los Angeles. The voyage was sponsored in part by the Hearst newspapers and took 21 days.
• 1929 – 2013 Ronnie Biggs (1929-2013) Died 18 December 2013, aged 84 Ronnie Biggs was a British criminal who took part in the 1963 Great Train Robbery and evaded capture for decades after escaping prison, living for years as a fugitive in Brazil. He died in a care home in England.
• 1929 1929 Palestine riots Violence over the Western Wall spreads across Mandate Palestine A dispute over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem led to a week of rioting across Mandatory Palestine. About 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed, including 67 Jews in the Hebron massacre. The violence ended the ancient Jewish community of Hebron.
• 1929 – 2004 Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) Died 11 November 2004, aged 75 Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organization for decades and co-founded Fatah, becoming the central figure of the Palestinian national movement. He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords and died in a French military hospital under disputed circumstances.
• 1929 – 2016 Arnold Palmer (1929-2016) Died 25 September 2016, aged 87 Palmer was an American professional golfer who won seven major championships and helped popularize the sport during the television era. His charisma earned him a fan following known as "Arnie's Army." He was a founding member of the Golf Channel and a successful businessman.
• 1929 – 2020 Stirling Moss The Greatest Never to be Champion The most successful driver in terms of race wins never to win a World Championship.
• 1929 – 2003 Bernard Williams (1929-2003) Died 10 June 2003, aged 73 Bernard Williams was an English philosopher regarded as among the most influential moral thinkers of his generation. He criticised the systematising ambitions of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics and argued for the complexity of ordinary moral life. He held chairs at Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford.
• 1929 First fully blind flight Doolittle takes off and lands on instruments alone Jimmy Doolittle took off, flew a set course and landed at Mitchel Field, New York, in a hooded cockpit, relying only on instruments. The flight proved that instrument flying was practical.
• 1929 A Farewell to Arms published Hemingway's First World War novel Ernest Hemingway's novel of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his love for a British nurse was published by Scribner's. It became his first best-seller.
• 1929 – 2024 Nikolai Ryzhkov (1929-2024) Died 28 February 2024, aged 94 Soviet politician who was premier of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.
• 1929 BBC begins experimental television broadcasts Baird's mechanical television on air The BBC began transmitting John Logie Baird's 30-line mechanical television system from London. They were among the first regular television transmissions in Britain.
• 1929 Kingdom renamed Yugoslavia The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes takes a new name King Alexander I renamed his state the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and replaced the historic provinces with nine new administrative regions called banovinas. The change was meant to suppress ethnic and regional identities in favour of a single Yugoslav nation.
• 1929 The Sound and the Fury published Faulkner's modernist novel of the Compson family William Faulkner's novel about the decline of the Compson family of Mississippi was published by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. Its stream-of-consciousness structure made it a landmark of American modernism.
• 1929 – 2023 Betty Boothroyd (1929-2023) Died 26 February 2023, aged 93 British politician and the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House of Commons.
• 1929 – 2025 Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1929-2025) Died 14 June 2025, aged 95 Nicaraguan newspaper publisher and politician who was president from 1990 to 1997, Central America's first woman head of state.
• 1929 – 2018 Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) Died 22 January 2018, aged 88 American author renowned for science fiction and fantasy works including the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness. Her writing explored anarchism, gender and ecology, influencing generations of writers. She died in Portland, Oregon.
• 1929 – 1990 Lev Yashin The Black Spider The only goalkeeper to ever win the Ballon d'Or (1963).
• 1929 Museum of Modern Art opens in New York MoMA's first exhibition opens in Manhattan The Museum of Modern Art opened in rented rooms in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue with an exhibition of Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh. It was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, and became one of the most influential modern art museums in the world.
• 1929 – 1982 Grace Kelly (1929-1982) Died 14 September 1982, aged 52 American actress who became Princess of Monaco after retiring from film. She died from injuries sustained when her car went off a mountain road near Monte Carlo.
• 1929 Byrd flies over the South Pole First flight over the South Pole Richard E. Byrd's Ford Trimotor Floyd Bennett, piloted by Bernt Balchen, flew from Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf over the South Pole and back. The flight took about 19 hours.
• 1929 – 1989 John Cassavetes (1929-1989) American actor and director, a pioneer of American independent film.
• 1929 – 1988 Chet Baker Chesney Henry Baker (23 December 1929 -- 13 May 1988) was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist whose cool, lyrical playing and vulnerable, intimate singing made him one of the most distinctive voices in jazz history. He rose to fame almost overnight in 1952 playing with Charlie Parker and then with Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet, whose recording of 'My Funny Valentine' became one of the most celebrated in jazz. Baker's beauty -- often compared to James Dean -- made him a cultural icon as much as a musician. His life was ravaged by heroin addiction: he lost his teeth, served prison time in Italy, disappeared for years and made a series of miraculous comebacks. He died in 1988 falling from an Amsterdam hotel window. He was 58.
• 1929 Stalin calls for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class Start of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation In a speech to Marxist agrarian scholars, Stalin announced a policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. Mass deportations and forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture followed and contributed to the famine of 1932-33.
• 1929 Indian National Congress raises the flag of Purna Swaraj Congress commits to full independence at Lahore At its Lahore session under Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian National Congress adopted complete independence from Britain as its goal. Nehru raised the flag on the banks of the Ravi, and 26 January 1930 was set as Independence Day.