March 29 – Some Important Events on this day
1461 👉🏼 Wars of the Roses: Battle of Towton.
Duke Edward of York defeats the Lancastrian army, deposes King Henry VI and Queen Margaret of Anjou and proclaims himself as King Edward IV.
1549 👉🏼 The city of Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of Brazil, is founded 🇧🇷
1673 👉🏼 English King Charles II accepts Test Act: Roman Catholics excluded from public functions
1792 👉🏼 King Gustav III of Sweden dies after being shot in the back at a midnight masquerade ball at Stockholm’s Royal Opera just 13 days earlier, on March 16, do you remember? He is succeeded by Gustav IV Adolf.
By 1792, King Gustav III of Sweden had amassed an enormous amount of personal power, displacing the old constitutional monarchy and forming an absolutist system based on the principles of the Enlightenment. Among many liberal reforms he had made (while also cracking down on dissent) was to curtail the powers of the Swedish nobility. Ever since he had essentially seized power in a coup against the Swedish parliament in 1772, the nobles had decided to oppose him, eventually conspiring to murder him.
The assassination took place during a masquerade ball at the Swedish Royal Opera. A Swedish count by the name of Jacob Johan Anckarström shot the King in the back as he entered the ball wearing his costume (in photo). Gustav did not die immediately however – continuing on for another thirteen days before dying of septicemia on 29 March 1792.
1795 👉🏼 Ludwig van Beethoven (24) has his debut performance as a pianist in Vienna 🎹
1798 👉🏼 Republic of Switzerland forms 🇨🇭
1827 👉🏼 20,000 attend Ludwig von Beethovens burial in Vienna
1848 👉🏼 Niagara Falls stops flowing for 30 hours due to an ice jam in the upper river. The flow of water stops completely over both of Niagara’s two falls.
1901 👉🏼 Edmund Barton is elected Prime Minister in Australia’s first parliamentary election 🇦🇺
1912 👉🏼 Captain Robert Scott, storm-bound in a tent near South Pole, makes last entry in his diary “the end cannot be far”.
Polar explorer led two expeditions to the Antarctic and was famously beaten to the South Pole by 33-34 days by Roald Amundsen, which was the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.
Scott and his team members died on their return from the pole from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold. He became a British hero. His last note, written as he froze to death, read “For God’s sake look after our people”.
1945 👉🏼 Movie star Jimmy Stewart is promoted to full colonel, one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years
1961 👉🏼 After a 4½ year trial Nelson Mandela is acquitted of treason in Pretoria
1974 👉🏼 Chinese farmers discover the Terracotta Army near Xi’an, 8,000 clay warrior statues buried to guard the tomb of China’s 1st emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
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1986 👉🏼 Beatles records officially go on sale in Russia 🇷🇺
1989 👉🏼 I. M. Pei’s pyramidal entrance to the Louvre opens in Paris.
When the Louvre Pyramid opened on this day it was not universally well liked. Now considered a symbol of Paris, while at the time it was labelled “an annex to Disneyland” by some, and was Chinese American architect I. M. Pei’s most controversial project in a long career.
Pei was commissioned by French president François Mitterrand to reorganize aspects of the Louvre and it took four years to construct. There are also three smaller glass pyramids surrounding it. The central large pyramid in the central courtyard of the Louvre provides a grand underground entrance to the 12th century palace turned museum in the center of Paris.
