On the night of November 29, 1830, a group of young Polish military cadets stormed the Belweder Palace in Warsaw in a failed attempt to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar's viceroy, igniting a broader insurrection against Russian control of the Congress Kingdom of Poland. The uprising spread rapidly across Polish lands but was ultimately crushed by Russian forces within a year, resulting in harsh reprisals and the abolition of Polish autonomy.
C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, the son of a solicitor. He would go on to become one of the twentieth century's most influential writers, producing the seven-volume 'Chronicles of Narnia,' the science-fiction 'Space Trilogy,' and works of Christian apologetics like 'Mere Christianity,' while teaching medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge.
Cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, building on captured cipher materials and the work of Alan Turing's team, made decisive progress unraveling the German Navy's four-rotor Enigma traffic in late November 1941, giving Allied convoys crucial early warning of U-boat positions in the North Atlantic. The intelligence, codenamed Ultra, would later be credited with saving hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and shortening the war.
By a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem under international administration. Jewish leaders celebrated in the streets while Arab delegations rejected the plan outright, setting the stage for the 1948 war that followed Israel's declaration of independence the following May.
On November 29, 1958, Chad was declared an autonomous republic within the French Community, ending direct colonial administration and installing a local government under French oversight. The move followed a referendum earlier that year in which French African territories voted on their constitutional future, and it set Chad on the path to full sovereignty, which it achieved on August 11, 1960.
Apollo 12 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on November 24, 1969, but the mission's final science payload — data and film from the lunar surface, including striking color images from the Moon — continued shaping public understanding of the landing through subsequent days, as NASA released imagery and briefed the press on the mission's ALSEP experiment package left operating on the Moon.
North Korea test-fired the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile before dawn on November 29, 2017, sending it to an altitude of roughly 4,475 kilometers on a lofted trajectory before it splashed down in the Sea of Japan. State media declared the launch proof North Korea had achieved the capability to strike the entire United States mainland, prompting emergency UN Security Council sessions and a fresh round of sanctions.