#TodayInHistory – November 29
4 min read
November 29 – Some important events on this day.
526 👉🏼 A possible date for the Antioch earthquake in present-day Syria (then the Byzantine Empire) which killed 200,000 people
1349 👉🏼 Jews of Augsburg Germany massacred
1745 👉🏼 Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army moves into Manchester and occupies Carlisle
1781 👉🏼 Crew of slave ship Zong murder about 142 African slaves by dumping them into the sea, to claim insurance
1864 👉🏼 Sand Creek massacre
On this day, peaceful band of Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Native Americans are massacred by Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek, Colorado.
The causes of the Sand Creek massacre were rooted in the long conflict for control of the Great Plains of eastern Colorado. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 guaranteed ownership of the area north of the Arkansas River to the Nebraska border to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. However, by the end of the decade, waves of Euro-American miners flooded across the region in search of gold in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, placing extreme pressure on the resources of the arid plains.By 1861, tensions between new settlers and Native Americans were rising.
1877 👉🏼 US inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time
1897 👉🏼 1st motorcycle race (Surrey, England)
1902 👉🏼 Gerhart Hauptmann’s play “Der arme Heinrich” premieres in Vienna
1921 👉🏼 Coldest day in November in Netherlands -14.0°C
1929 👉🏼 American Explorer Richard Byrd flies over South Pole
1935 👉🏼 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his famous thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat”, a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics
1951 👉🏼 1st underground atomic explosion at Frenchman Flat in Nevada
1972 👉🏼 Co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell releases Pong, the 1st commercially successful video game, in Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California.
The world’s first commercially successful video game, Pong was manufactured by Atari and released in 1972. Initially it was just designed as a training exercise by Atari employee Alan Alcorn and took the form of a two-dimensional ping pong game based on table tennis.
In 1975 a home version was sold through Sears and was their most successful product at the time. Today Pong’s success is often regarded as one of the prime reasons for the establishment of the video gaming industry. One machine remains part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection.
1975 👉🏼 Kilauea Volcano erupts in Hawaii
1994 👉🏼 Seoul, Korea, celebrated the 600th anniversary of its founding
2000 👉🏼 Millions of tourists who have visited the property where William Shakespeare’s mother supposedly lived as a child have been to the wrong house, and it was revealed on this day.
Historically, Mary Arden married the playwright’s father, John Shakespeare, in 1557, when she was 20. The Ardens, who lived in the village of Wilmcote, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, had been a prominent family in the area for hundreds of years and were well respected.
It is thought this social standing came into play years later when it was revealed that 26-year-old farmer’s daughter Anne Hathaway was pregnant and that 18-year-old William Shakespeare was the father.
Mary Arden, with her strict code of moral conduct, might well have had a major influence on the outcome for her son: marriage. Many historians believe that the union in 1582 between three months pregnant Anne and young William was literally a shotgun wedding.
In 1930, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which preserves buildings and records associated with the playwright, purchased a property in Wilmcote thought to be the home where Mary grew up, and they named it Mary Arden’s House.
Images of the property became prolific, appearing on guidebooks in six languages, postcards, the wrapping for boxes of Mary Arden fudge and other tourist merchandise. As a result, about 100,000 visitors came to the house each year.
However, a research into the trust’s assets commissioned in 2000, involving detailed examination of 16th century property records, revealed that the so-called “Mary Arden’s House” was not Mary Arden’s house at all, but she had lived 50 yards down the lane in a building known for years as Glebe Farm.
A Trust director said that the property was purchased in good faith on the basis of local tradition. After the truth became known Glebe Farm was renamed Mary Arden’s Farm and the 1930-purchased property was renamed Palmer’s Farm after a farmer called Adam Palmer who lived there in the 1570s.
Luckily, the Trust bought Glebe Farm in 1968 when it came up for sale, not having a clue about its historic significance.
The problem with Glebe Farm, now officially Mary Arden’s Farm, is that it is distinctly un-Shakespearean. By the 1800s it had evolved into a typical Victorian farmhouse and that’s just how it looks still today while, ironically, Palmer’s Farm is resplendent in Tudor design and furnishings….
