August 29 in History

Francisco Pizarro ordered the execution of Atahualpa, the last sovereign emperor of the Inca Empire, on August 29, 1533, in the plaza of Cajamarca. The emperor was garroted after accepting a last-minute baptism to avoid being burned at the stake. His death completed the most audacious and destructive act of conquest in the history of the Americas, carried out by fewer than 200 Spanish soldiers against an empire of ten million people. Pizarro had captured Atahualpa nine months earlier in a calculated ambush. The emperor arrived at Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, with an escort of several thousand unarmed attendants, expecting a diplomatic meeting. Pizarro's men, hidden in buildings around the plaza, attacked at a signal. Cavalry, cannon fire, and steel swords slaughtered an estimated 2,000 to 6,000 Inca in under two hours. Not a single Spaniard was killed. Atahualpa was seized alive, and his capture paralyzed the Inca command structure, which depended entirely on the emperor's authority. Atahualpa, grasping his captors' motives quickly, offered a ransom: he would fill a room roughly 22 feet long by 17 feet wide with gold to a height of over eight feet, plus two smaller rooms with silver. The Inca delivered the ransom over the following months, stripping temples, palaces, and sacred sites across the empire. Pizarro's men melted down masterworks of Inca goldsmithing into bars. The total haul was enormous, worth hundreds of millions in modern currency, and each soldier received a share that would have taken a lifetime to earn in Spain. Having extracted the ransom, Pizarro fabricated charges of treason and idolatry against Atahualpa and staged a summary trial. Several of Pizarro's own officers protested the injustice. The execution removed the one figure who might have organized unified Inca resistance and allowed Pizarro to install a puppet emperor. Spanish control expanded rapidly. European diseases, already spreading through the empire, killed far more Inca than Spanish weapons ever did. Within a generation, the population had collapsed by an estimated 90 percent, and one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the Western Hemisphere had been effectively destroyed.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, on the morning of August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. The wind damage was devastating, but what followed was catastrophic: the federal levee system protecting New Orleans failed in over 50 locations, flooding 80 percent of the city and trapping tens of thousands of residents on rooftops, in attics, and inside the Superdome. The storm killed approximately 1,836 people and caused over $108 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in American history at the time. Katrina had formed over the Bahamas on August 23 and crossed southern Florida as a Category 1 hurricane before entering the Gulf of Mexico, where it exploded into a Category 5 monster. Warm Gulf waters fed the storm to peak winds of 175 miles per hour. Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for New Orleans on August 28, but roughly 100,000 residents, many of them elderly, poor, or without transportation, could not leave. The city provided no buses. The Superdome was designated as a shelter of last resort, and roughly 20,000 people crowded inside. The storm surge along the Mississippi coast reached nearly 28 feet, obliterating beach communities from Waveland to Biloxi. Casino barges were hurled hundreds of yards inland. But the worst destruction occurred in New Orleans, where the levees built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proved fatally inadequate. Floodwalls along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Avenue Canal failed not because the storm exceeded their design capacity, but because of fundamental engineering flaws in their construction. Water poured into neighborhoods at terrifying speed. The government response was disastrously slow. FEMA director Michael Brown was removed from command after ten days. Evacuees at the Superdome and the Convention Center waited days for food, water, and transportation. Television footage of American citizens wading through floodwater, begging for help from rooftops, and dying in plain sight shocked the world. The racial and economic dimensions of the disaster were impossible to ignore: the neighborhoods that flooded most severely were overwhelmingly Black and poor. Katrina exposed failures at every level of government and forced a national reckoning with infrastructure neglect, emergency preparedness, and the persistent inequalities of American life.

The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union voted to suspend all activities of the Communist Party on August 29, 1991, a week after a bungled coup attempt by hardliners had accelerated the very collapse they were trying to prevent. The party that had ruled the world's largest country for 74 years, commanded the world's largest military, and shaped the ideological landscape of the twentieth century was shut down in a single afternoon legislative session. The suspension followed the failed August Coup, in which a group of senior Communist officials, KGB leaders, and military commanders attempted to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on August 19. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation home in Crimea, declared a state of emergency, and sent tanks into Moscow. The plotters expected the population to submit. Instead, Russian President Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building, or White House, and rallied public resistance. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites built barricades and faced down the military. After three days, the coup collapsed as military units refused to fire on civilians and key commanders defected to Yeltsin. Gorbachev returned to Moscow diminished. Yeltsin, now the dominant political figure in the country, moved quickly to dismantle the Communist Party's institutional power. Party offices were sealed. Archives were placed under government control. The party's vast property holdings, estimated at billions of dollars, were frozen. The Supreme Soviet's suspension vote was nearly unanimous, with many Communist deputies themselves voting in favor, recognizing that the party's association with the failed coup had made its survival politically impossible. The suspension proved permanent. The Soviet Union itself dissolved on December 26, 1991, when Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence. Fifteen independent nations emerged from the wreckage. The Communist Party that had once commanded the loyalty of 19 million members, controlled the world's largest nuclear arsenal, and projected its ideology across five continents disappeared not in revolution or war but through a parliamentary vote. The speed of the collapse stunned observers worldwide and remains one of the most dramatic political disintegrations in history.

King Edward III of England personally led his fleet into battle against a Castilian armada off the coast of Winchelsea on August 29, 1350, in a savage naval engagement fought at such close quarters that it resembled a land battle on floating platforms. English sailors and men-at-arms boarded enemy vessels, fought hand-to-hand across blood-slicked decks, and sank or captured at least 14 of the 40 Castilian ships. Edward's own vessel was damaged so badly it nearly sank before he transferred to an enemy ship mid-battle. The confrontation, known as Les Espagnols sur Mer (The Spaniards on the Sea), arose from a commercial dispute that had turned violent. Castilian merchants and privateers had been attacking English shipping in the Bay of Biscay, seizing cargoes and killing crews. English wine trade with Gascony, a critical source of crown revenue, was particularly affected. Edward assembled a fleet at the port of Winchelsea, on the Sussex coast, and waited for the Castilian convoy, which was returning from Flanders loaded with trade goods. The Castilian ships were larger and taller than the English vessels, giving them a significant advantage in the ramming and boarding tactics that defined medieval naval warfare. When the fleets met in the late afternoon, the Castilians used their height to rain crossbow bolts, stones, and iron bars down on the English decks. Edward's flagship, the Thomas, was holed below the waterline and began sinking. The king and his entourage leaped aboard a Castilian vessel and captured it in brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Edward's son, the Black Prince, had his ship grappled by a larger Castilian vessel and was reportedly in danger of drowning before the Duke of Lancaster came to his rescue. The battle continued into the evening. English losses were significant, with several ships sunk and heavy casualties, but the Castilian fleet was forced to retreat with far greater damage. The victory secured English control of the Channel and protected the vital trade routes to Gascony. Winchelsea was one of the last major naval battles in which the king of England personally fought, and Edward's willingness to risk his life alongside his men reinforced the warrior reputation he had built at Crecy four years earlier.

Portuguese and Brazilian diplomats signed the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro on August 29, 1825, with Portugal formally recognizing Brazilian independence in exchange for two million pounds sterling and the honorary title of Emperor of Brazil for the Portuguese king. The treaty ended a three-year war for independence and established Brazil as the only nation in the Americas to achieve sovereignty as an empire rather than a republic. Brazil's path to independence was unlike any other in Latin America. When Napoleon's forces invaded Portugal in 1807, the entire Portuguese royal court, roughly 15,000 people, sailed to Brazil under British naval escort. King Joao VI ruled the Portuguese Empire from Rio de Janeiro for thirteen years, elevating Brazil from colony to co-equal kingdom. When the Portuguese parliament demanded Joao's return in 1821, he sailed home but left his son Pedro as regent. The parliament then attempted to reduce Brazil back to colonial status, revoking its administrative autonomy and ordering Pedro home as well. Pedro refused. On September 7, 1822, he declared Brazilian independence on the banks of the Ipiranga River near Sao Paulo, reportedly shouting "Independence or death!" He was crowned Emperor Pedro I of Brazil in December. The war that followed was modest by Latin American standards, consisting largely of naval engagements and scattered fighting in the northern provinces where Portuguese garrisons held out. British diplomatic pressure pushed both sides toward negotiation, partly because Britain wanted to protect its enormous commercial interests in Brazilian trade. The treaty's terms reflected British mediation and Portuguese weakness. Brazil paid an indemnity of two million pounds, much of it financed by a British loan that left the new nation heavily indebted to London. Portugal's king retained the empty title of Emperor of Brazil, a face-saving gesture with no practical authority. Britain extracted commercial concessions from both parties. The treaty established the template for Brazil's early foreign relations: formally independent, practically dependent on British capital and trade. Pedro I abdicated in 1831, leaving the throne to his five-year-old son, and Brazil would not become a republic until a military coup in 1889.