December 29 in History

The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was an 1890 armed conflict between Native Americans and the United States Army. It was part of the U.S. Army’s Pine Ridge Campaign. Between 250 and 300 Lakota people were killed, and 51 were wounded. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed and 39 were wounded. Nineteen soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor specifically for Wounded Knee, and 31 overall for the campaign.

Cecil Blount DeMille, often known in popular culture as Mr. DeMille, was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he created 70 features including silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history, with many films dominating the box office three or four at a time. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants.

The Washington Naval Treaty, also known as the Five-Power Treaty, was signed during 1922 among the major Allies of World War I, which agreed to prevent an arms race by limiting naval construction. It was negotiated at the Washington Naval Conference in Washington, D.C., from November 1921 to February 1922 and signed by the governments of the British Empire, United States, France, Italy, and Japan. It limited the construction of battleships, battlecruisers and aircraft carriers by the signatories. The numbers of other categories of warships, including cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, were not limited by the treaty, but those ships were limited to 10,000 tons displacement each.

World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, the latter enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the only nuclear weapons used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 60 to 75 million people. Millions died as a result of massacres, starvation, disease, and genocides, including the Holocaust. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

On December 29, 1975, a bomb detonated near the Trans World Airlines (TWA) baggage reclaim terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, United States, killing 11 people and seriously injuring 74 others. Investigators theorized that it might have been committed by anti-Yugoslavia Croatians or agents of the Yugoslavian government intending to discredit the opposition, but the crime remains unsolved. The attack occurred during a four-year period of heightened terrorism within the United States, and 1975 was especially volatile, with bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C. and two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford.

The Nikkei 225, or the Nikkei Stock Average , more commonly called the Nikkei or the Nikkei index, is a stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). It is a price-weighted index, operating in the Japanese Yen (JP¥), and its components are reviewed twice a year. The Nikkei 225 measures the performance of 225 highly capitalised and liquid publicly owned companies in Japan from a wide array of industry sectors. Since 2017, the index is calculated every five seconds. It was originally launched by the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1950, and was taken over by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper in 1970, when the Tokyo Exchange switched to the Tokyo Stock Price Index (TOPIX), which is weighed by market capitalisation rather than stock prices.

Turkish Airlines Flight 278, operated by a Boeing 737-4Y0 registered TC-JES and named Mersin, was a domestic scheduled flight from Ankara Esenboğa Airport to Van Ferit Melen Airport in eastern Turkey that crashed on 29 December 1994 during its final approach to land in driving snow. Five of the seven crew and 52 of the 69 passengers lost their lives, while 2 crew members and 17 passengers survived with serious injuries.

Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and by extension to Democratic Kampuchea, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.

The Anglo-American loan, officially the Anglo-American Loan Agreement, was a loan made to the United Kingdom by the United States on 15 July 1946. The loan helped keep the British economy afloat after the Second World War. The loan was negotiated by British economist John Maynard Keynes and American diplomat William L. Clayton. Problems arose on the American side, with many members of Congress reluctant to approve the agreement and with sharp differences emerging between the Treasury and State Departments. The loan amounted to US$3.75 billion (£2.2 billion) at a low interest rate of 2%; Canada loaned an additional US$1.19 billion (£607 million). The British economy in 1947 was negatively affected by a provision requiring the convertibility into U.S. dollars of wartime sterling balances that Britain had borrowed from India and other countries. However, by 1948, the Marshall Plan provided financial assistance that was not expected to be repaid. Repayment of the loan was completed in 2006, after being extended by six years.

In December 2013, two separate suicide bombings a day apart targeted mass transportation in the city of Volgograd, in the Volgograd Oblast of Southern Russia, killing 34 people overall, including both perpetrators. The attacks followed a bus bombing carried out in the same city two months earlier.

At 12:19 PM CET on 29 December 2020, an earthquake of magnitude 6.4 Mw hit central Croatia, with an epicenter located roughly 3 km (1.9 mi) west-southwest of Petrinja. The maximum felt intensity was estimated at VIII to IX (Destructive) on the European macroseismic scale. Before this event there were three foreshocks, the strongest of which had a magnitude of 5.2 Mw on the day before. The earthquake was followed by numerous aftershocks, the strongest of which had a magnitude of 4.9 Mw.