December 29 in History

Four knights walked into Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of December 29, 1170, found Archbishop Thomas Becket at vespers, and hacked him to death with their swords in front of horrified monks and clergy. The murder, carried out by men loyal to King Henry II, transformed Becket from a quarrelsome prelate into the most venerated martyr in medieval Christendom and forced the most powerful king in Europe to submit to a humiliating public penance. The conflict between Henry and Becket was rooted in a struggle over jurisdiction that had been simmering for years. Henry had appointed his close friend and chancellor as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, expecting a compliant ally at the head of the English church. Becket instead underwent a dramatic personal transformation, exchanging his luxurious lifestyle for monastic austerity and fiercely defending ecclesiastical privileges against royal encroachment. The central dispute concerned criminous clerks: Henry wanted clergy accused of crimes tried in royal courts, while Becket insisted on the church exclusive right to judge its own members. After six years of conflict including Becket exile in France, Henry reportedly uttered "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" at a Christmas court in Normandy. Four knights took this as a command and crossed the Channel to Canterbury. They confronted Becket in the cathedral, demanded he lift excommunications he had imposed on several bishops, and when he refused, struck him down. One blow sliced off the top of his skull, and a final stroke scattered his brains across the cathedral floor. The murder scandalized Europe. Pope Alexander III canonized Becket in 1173. Henry performed public penance at the tomb in 1174, walking barefoot through Canterbury while monks flogged him. Canterbury became England most popular pilgrimage site, inspiring Chaucer Canterbury Tales. Becket remains the most famous martyr in English history.

Soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry opened fire on a camp of disarmed Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, killing more than 200 people in the worst massacre of Native Americans by the United States military. Four Hotchkiss mountain guns positioned on a rise above the encampment poured explosive shells into the tipis at a rate of nearly fifty rounds per minute, shredding everything in their path. The 7th Cavalry had intercepted a band of roughly 350 Miniconjou Lakota under Chief Spotted Elk, known to the Army as Big Foot, the day before on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Spotted Elk was ill with pneumonia and traveling under a white flag, but the Army suspected his band of involvement in the Ghost Dance movement, a spiritual practice that promised the return of the buffalo and the dead ancestors and the disappearance of white settlers. The military viewed the Ghost Dance as an incitement to insurrection, though most participants understood it as a prayer for deliverance. On the morning of December 29, soldiers entered the camp to confiscate weapons. A scuffle broke out when a deaf Lakota man named Black Coyote resisted surrendering his rifle. A shot was fired, and within seconds the soldiers surrounding the camp opened up from all sides. Warriors who still possessed hidden weapons fought back briefly, but the Hotchkiss guns made resistance futile. Cavalrymen pursued fleeing women and children for miles across the frozen prairie, shooting many in the back. Bodies were found up to two miles from the camp. Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor. The dead Lakota were left on the ground for three days during a blizzard, then buried in a mass grave by a civilian crew paid two dollars per body. The massacre effectively ended armed Native resistance on the Great Plains. The National Congress of American Indians has repeatedly demanded the medals be rescinded; they have not been.

The Luftwaffe dropped over 100,000 incendiary bombs on the City of London on the night of December 29, 1940, igniting a firestorm that destroyed a square mile of the oldest part of the capital and created the most iconic image of the Blitz: the dome of St. Paul Cathedral rising untouched above a sea of smoke and flame. The photograph, taken by Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason, became the defining symbol of British defiance. The raid was deliberately timed. German intelligence knew that Sunday between Christmas and New Year would find the City deserted, fire-watchers on holiday. The Thames was at exceptionally low tide, making it difficult for brigades to draw water. Buildings locked for the weekend had no one to extinguish incendiaries. The combination created the worst conflagration London had experienced since 1666. Approximately 1,500 fires merged into two major conflagrations, one north of St. Paul and one to its south, creating a furnace of such intensity that firefighters reported the metal fittings on their helmets becoming too hot to touch at a distance of several hundred yards. Nearly 200 civilians were killed, and the fire destroyed or damaged dozens of Wren churches, the Guildhall, eight of the livery company halls, and countless commercial buildings. The area around Paternoster Row, the center of British book publishing for centuries, was annihilated, taking with it an estimated five million books. St. Paul survival was not accidental. A volunteer fire watch organized by the cathedral Dean had been stationed on the roof throughout the Blitz, and that night they extinguished over twenty incendiary bombs that landed on the dome and in the galleries. The raid prompted Churchill to issue an order that St. Paul must be saved at all costs, and subsequent fire-watching requirements were dramatically expanded across London. The burned areas were eventually redeveloped into the Barbican Estate and the modern financial district.

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the two most senior surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, issued a public apology on December 29, 1998, for the regime that killed an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. "We are sorry, very sorry," Khieu Samphan told reporters in the northern stronghold of Pailin, where the former Khmer Rouge leaders had been living comfortably after defecting to the Cambodian government. The apology was widely condemned as hollow, self-serving, and decades too late. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot under the revolutionary name Brother Number One, had seized Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and immediately emptied the city at gunpoint, forcing its two million residents into the countryside to serve as agricultural laborers in what the regime called Year Zero. Currency was abolished, schools closed, religion forbidden, and anyone with an education or even eyeglasses was subject to execution. The Tuol Sleng interrogation center processed over 14,000 prisoners; seven survived. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and toppled the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, but the regime retreated to jungle strongholds along the Thai border and continued fighting for nearly two decades. Western nations supported the Khmer Rouge UN seat claim throughout the 1980s as Cold War opposition to Vietnam. The movement fragmented through the 1990s as factions defected in exchange for amnesty. The 1998 apology came as the remnants of the movement were negotiating their final surrender. Pol Pot had died in his jungle camp in April 1998, never facing justice. The UN-backed tribunal did not begin trials until 2006. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted of genocide in 2018 and sentenced to life. The tribunal cost over $300 million, took more than a decade, and convicted only three people for one of the century worst atrocities.

Richard Feynman stood before an audience of physicists at the California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959, and described a world that did not yet exist: machines built atom by atom, entire libraries written on a pinhead, and surgical instruments small enough to operate inside a human cell. His lecture, "There Plenty of Room at the Bottom," delivered at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, is now recognized as the conceptual birth of nanotechnology, though the word itself would not be coined for another fifteen years. Feynman, already famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics that would earn him the 1965 Nobel Prize, approached the subject not as abstract theory but as an engineering challenge. He calculated that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be written on a pinhead if reduced by 25,000 times. He proposed tiny machines building even tinier machines, each generation manufacturing the next smaller, eventually reaching the atomic level where individual atoms could be arranged at will. The audience found the talk entertaining but not urgent. No tools existed to manipulate individual atoms, and the idea seemed like science fiction. Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes: one for a working motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch, another for writing text at 1/25,000 scale. The motor prize was claimed within months using watchmaking techniques, a result Feynman found disappointingly unimaginative. The text prize went unclaimed until 1985, when a Stanford graduate student used electron beam lithography to write the first page of "A Tale of Two Cities" at the required scale. By then, the scanning tunneling microscope, invented in 1981, had made it possible to image individual atoms. In 1989, IBM researchers used one to spell out the company logo by moving thirty-five xenon atoms on a nickel surface. The field Feynman envisioned now drives a global nanotechnology industry worth over $90 billion annually.

Four knights murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket on the altar of Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170, acting on what they interpreted as King Henry II's frustrated outburst against his former ally. The words Henry reportedly spoke, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" or some variation, were likely an expression of exasperation rather than a direct order. The four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton, rode to Canterbury, confronted Becket in the cathedral during Vespers, and struck him down with swords. The killing was savage: the final blow split Becket's skull and spilled his brains on the cathedral floor. The murder shocked all of Christendom. Becket and Henry had been close allies before Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, expecting Becket to be a compliant tool of royal authority over the Church. Instead, Becket embraced his new role with fanatical devotion, defending Church prerogatives against the king's attempts to bring clerical courts under royal jurisdiction. The quarrel between them, codified in the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164, went to the heart of medieval governance: who held supreme authority in a Christian kingdom, the king or the Church? Becket was canonized just three years after his death, and Canterbury became medieval Europe's premier pilgrimage destination, generating enough revenue to rebuild the cathedral and sustain the city's economy for centuries. Henry was forced into a humiliating public penance, walking barefoot through Canterbury while monks flogged him. The murder subordinated English royal authority to the Church for generations and established the principle that even kings could not kill their way out of ecclesiastical disputes.

Jimmy Carter died in December 2024 in Plains, Georgia, one hundred years old. He was, at his death, the oldest person ever to have served as U.S. President. He was also the president with the longest post-presidential career: forty-three years of building Habitat for Humanity houses, monitoring elections in conflict zones, negotiating with North Korea on his own initiative, and eradicating Guinea worm disease from Africa. He lost reelection in 1980 in a landslide. He spent the next four decades building what some historians call the most consequential post-presidency in American history. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, the first president born in a hospital. He graduated from the Naval Academy, served as a nuclear submarine officer under Admiral Hyman Rickover, and returned to Georgia to run the family peanut farm after his father's death. He was elected governor in 1970 and won the presidency in 1976 as a Washington outsider in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. His presidency was marked by genuine achievements, including the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, the Panama Canal treaties, and the establishment of the Department of Energy and Department of Education. But the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation, and the energy crisis overwhelmed his administration, and Ronald Reagan defeated him in a 49-state landslide in 1980. His post-presidency redefined the role. Through the Carter Center, founded in 1982, he monitored over 100 elections in 39 countries, mediated conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Haiti, and led the campaign that reduced Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases in 1986 to fewer than 15 cases by 2024. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He built houses with Habitat for Humanity into his 90s. He taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains almost every week until his health declined.