October 29 ...

In 1682 the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, landed at what is now Chester, PA. In 1901 President McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted. In 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. In 1929 on Black Tuesday, prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America's Great Depression began. In 1947 former first lady Frances Cleveland Preston died in Baltimore at age 83. In 1956 during the Suez Canal crisis, Israel launched an invasion of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. In 1966 the National Organization for Women was founded. In 1969 the precursor to the Internet was created when the first computer-to-computer link was established on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). In 1979 on the 50th anniversary of the great stock market crash, anti-nuclear protesters tried but failed to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. In 1998 Sen. John Glenn, at age 77, went back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery. In 2004 in a videotaped statement broadcast on al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden directly admitted for the first time that he'd ordered the Sept. 11 attacks and told America "the best way to avoid another Manhattan" was to stop threatening Muslims' security; also on this day, European Union leaders signed the EU's first constitution.