Republic Day in Turkey (1923)
- 539 BC – Cyrus the Great entered the city of Babylon and detained Nabonidus.
- 437 – Valentinian III, Western Roman Emperor, marries Licinia Eudoxia, daughter of his cousin Theodosius II, Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople unifying the two branches of the House of Theodosius
- 969 – Byzantine troops occupy Antioch Syria
- 1268 – Conradin, the last legitimate male heir of the Hohenstaufen dynasty of Kings of Germany and Holy Roman Emperors, is executed along with his companion Frederick I, Margrave of Baden by Charles I of Sicily, a political rival and ally to the hostile Roman Catholic church.
- 1390 – First trial for witchcraft in Paris leading to the death of three people.
- 1422 – Charles VII of France becomes king in succession to his father Charles VI of France
- 1675 – Leibniz makes the first use of the long s (∫) as a symbol of the integral in calculus.
- 1787 – Mozart‘s opera Don Giovanni receives its first performance in Prague.
- 1792 – Mount Hood (Oregon) is named after the British naval officer Alexander Arthur Hood by Lt. William E. Broughton who spotted the mountain near the mouth of the Willamette River.
- 1863 – Eighteen countries meeting in Geneva agree to form the International Red Cross.
- 1886 – The first ticker-tape parade takes place in New York City when office workers spontaneously throw ticker tape into the streets as the Statue of Liberty is dedicated.
- 1918 – The German High Seas Fleet is incapacitated when sailors mutiny on the night of the 29th-30th, an action which would trigger the German revolution.
- 1921 – The Link River Dam, a part of the Klamath Reclamation Project, is completed.
- 1923 – Turkey becomes a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
- 1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ’29 or “Black Tuesday”, ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.
- 1944 – The city of Breda in the Netherlands is liberated by 1st Polish Armoured Division.
- 1945 – Getulio Vargas, president of Brazil, resigns.
- 1956 – Tangier Protocol is signed: The international city Tangier is reintegrated into Morocco.
- 1957 – Israel‘s prime minister David Ben Gurion and five of his ministers are injured when a hand grenade is tossed into Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
- 1960 – In Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (who later takes the name Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight.
- 1961 – Syria exits from the United Arab Republic.
- 1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar unite to form the Republic of Tanzania.
- 1964 – A collection of irreplaceable gems, including the 565 carat (113 g) Star of India, is stolen by a group of thieves (among them is “Murph the surf”) from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
- 1966 – National Organization For Women is founded.
- 1967 – Montreal‘s World Fair, Expo 67, closes with over 50 million visitors.
- 1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
- 1991 – The American Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid.
- 2008 – Delta Air Lines merges with Northwest Airlines, creating the world’s largest airline and reducing the number of US legacy carriers to 5.
More at Wikipedia: October 29.