Today in History, 4/29

1429: Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans and is considered the Second Coming of Christ.1770: James Cook arrives and names Botany Bay, Australia. Botany Bay!1861: Maryland's House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union.
1863: William Randolph Hearst is born.1899: Duke Ellington is born.

1901: Hirohito, Emperor of Japan is born.1907: Fred Zinnermann is born. He directed From Here to Eternity, High Noon and A Man for All Seasons.

1933: Rod McKuen is born.1945: Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun and designates Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor.
1945: The Dachau concentration camp is liberated by US forces.
1946: Former Prime Minister Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders are indicted for war crimes.1947: Tommy James of The Shondells is born.

1952: Nora Dunn is born.

1952: Conspiracy theorist David Icke is born. He feels that the world is secretly governed by shape-changing humanoid lizards who feast on the blood of blond children. One of the world leaders that the lizards are in the guise of is none other than Boxcar Willie. I always wanted to know how that particular lizard felt about having to be Boxcar Willie. I mean, you're there in line with the rest of the aliens taking part in Operation: Human Nuggets and you're all getting your assignment for which powerful human you're going to impersonate. "OK, Bok-Sno, you're going to be George W. Bush, Loc-Nat, you're going to be Rupert Murdoch, Bik-Lor, you're going to be Queen Elizabeth and Reg-Tak, you're going to be Boxcar Willie." It would be hard not to feel a little hurt. Or maybe the alien lizards have assumed their identities when their victims were children. Does that mean that the George W. Bush alien spent the 80's blowing lines of coke off a strippers ass in Houston? The other lizards would be all, "Hey, Bok-Sno, I know you're a real method actor and all about living your part but you've spent the last fifteen years drunk and stoned. At what point are you going to get on with conquering the world?" 1954: Jerry Seinfeld is born. Ironically, he's one of the people who David Icke believes is a lizard.

"What's with the blond children?
Why do we need to feast on their blood?
Won't any other children do?"

1955: Kate Mulgrew is born. She is best known as the take-no-prisoners Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, but she was also in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, one of my favorite bad movies.1957: Daniel Day Lewis is born.
1957: Timothy Treadwell is born. He was so into grizzly bears that he lived among them for 13 seasons until they got sick of him and devoured him and his girlfriend. That's why I don't hang out with grizzlies.
1958: Michelle Pfeiffer is born.1958: Eve Plumb is born. She played Jan Brady (the middle daughter) on The Brady Bunch.
1960: Robert J. Sawyer is born. He is a science-fiction writer who wrote, among others, Calculating God.
1967: After refusing induction into the US Army, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing titles.
1968: Carnie Wilson of Wilson-Phillips is born.
1970: Uma Thurman is born.1986: Roger Clemens sets a major league baseball record with 20 strikeouts in nine innings against the Seattle Mariners.
1992: Following the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case, Los Angeles is engulfed by three days of rioting.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.