History of the Day for:
January 29
- 1802: John Beckley became the first Librarian of Congress.
- 1820: Britain's King George III died at Windsor Castle, ending a reign that had seen both the American and the French revolutions.
- 1845: Edgar Allen Poe's poem "The Raven" was published under a pseudonym in the New York Evening Mirror.
- 1850: Henry Clay introduced in the Senate a compromise bill on slavery which included the admission of California into the Union as a free state.
- 1860: Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist and short story writer whose works included "The Cherry Orchard," "Uncle Vanya" and "The Three Sisters," was born.
- 1861: Kansas became the 34th state of the Union.
- 1880: Actor and comedian W.C. Fields was born.
- 1886: German motor pioneer Karl Benz was granted a patent for the first successful gasoline-driven car.
- 1896: U.S. physician Emile Grubbe became the first doctor to use radiation treatment for breast cancer.
- 1900: The American Baseball League was founded in Chicago.
- 1916: The first bombings of Paris by German Zeppelins took place.
- 1920: Walt Disney started his first job as an artist. He was paid $40 a week with the K.C. Slide Co.
- 1924: The ice cream cone rolling machine was patented by Carl Taylor of Cleveland.
- 1929: The Seeing Eye Guide Dog Foundation was organized.
- 1936: The Baseball Hall Of Fame was established in Cooperstown, N.Y.
- 1940: Three trains on the Sakurajima Line, in Osaka, Japan, collide and explode while approaching Ajikawaguchi station. 181 people are killed.
- 1943: The first day of the Battle of Rennell Island, U.S. cruiser Chicago is torpedoed and heavily damaged by Japanese bombers.
- 1944: USS Missouri (BB-63) the last battleship commissioned by the US Navy is launched.
- 1944: World War II: The Battle of Cisterna takes place in central Italy.
- 1944: World War II: Approximately 38 men, women, and children die in the Koniuchy massacre in Poland.
- 1944: In Bologna, Italy, the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio is destroyed in an air-raid.
- 1959: Walt Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" was released in the United States.
- 1963: U.S. poet Robert Frost died. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times, he was invited to read a poem at the 1961 inauguration of President John Kennedy; The first members of football's Hall of Fame were named in Canton, Ohio.
- 1964: Stanley Kubrick's cold-war satire "Dr. Strangelove," starring Peter Sellers in three roles, premiered; The ninth Winter Olympic games opened in Innsbruck, Austria.
- 1979: President Carter commuted Patricia Hearst's 7-year sentence to 2 years; When San Diego teenager Brenda Spencer was asked by police why she had opened fire on her schoolmates, wounding several children and killing two of the staff at Cleveland Elementary School, she replied, "I don't like Mondays."
- 1996: The 6,138th performance of "Cats" was held in London, surpassing the record of Broadway's longest-running musical, "A Chorus Line."
- 1996: La Fenice, Venice's opera house, is destroyed by fire.
- 1998: In Birmingham, Alabama, a bomb explodes at an abortion clinic, killing one and severely wounding another. Serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph is suspected as the culprit.
- 2001: Thousands of student protesters in Indonesia storm parliament and demand that President Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals.
- 2002: In his State of the Union Address, United States President George W. Bush describes "regimes that sponsor terror" as an Axis of Evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
- 2005: The first direct commercial flights from the mainland China (from Guangzhou) to Taiwan since 1949 arrived in Taipei. Shortly afterwards, a China Airlines carrier landed in Beijing.