November 29 ...
In1777 San Jose, CA, was founded as el Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe. It was the first civilian settlement in Alta California. In 1781 the slave ship Zong dumped 133 sick slaves into the sea in order to claim insurance. British Courts disallowed the claim, but no one was charged with the slaves' murders. The incident is credited with starting off the abolition movement. In 1832 novelist Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, PA (now part of Philadelphia). In 1864 a Colorado militia killed at least 150 peaceful Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre. In 1890 the US Naval Academy defeated the US Military Academy 24-0 in the first Army-Navy football game, played in West Point, NY. In 1898 author C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1924 Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels before he could complete his opera "Turandot." (It was finished by Franco Alfano.) In 1929 Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd radioed that he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. In 1947 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. In 1952 President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower kept his campaign promise to visit Korea to assess the ongoing conflict. In 1961 "Enos" the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning. In 1963 President Johnson named a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. In 1964 the US Roman Catholic Church instituted sweeping changes in the liturgy, including the use of English instead of Latin. In 1967 US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced his resignation; he became president of the World Bank. In 1981 actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, CA, at age 43. In 1986 actor Cary Grant died in Davenport, IA, at age 82. In 1990 the United Nations Security Council passed UN Security Council Resolution 678, authorizing military intervention in Iraq if that nation did not withdraw its forces from Kuwait and free all foreign hostages by January 15, 1991. In 2001 former Beatle George Harrison died in Los Angeles following a battle with cancer; he was 58.