Sir Walter Raleigh, English adventurer, writer and favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, is beheaded in London, under a sentence brought against him 15 years earlier for conspiracy against King James I.

On October 29, 1918, sailors in the German High Seas Fleet refuse to obey an order from the German Admiralty to go to sea to launch one final attack on the British navy. Their defiance echoes the despondent mood of many on the side of the Central Powers during the last days of World War I.

On October 29, 1955, almost one month after up-and-coming actor James Dean died in a tragic car crash at the age of 24, Warner Bros. Pictures releases his second major film, Rebel Without a Cause. In the movie, Dean played Jim Stark, a rebellious teenager who moves to Los Angeles, where he clashes with his father, struggles to fit in at his new high school and runs afoul of the local tough guy, Buzz.

Israeli armed forces push into Egypt toward the Suez Canal, initiating the Suez Crisis. They would soon be joined by French and British forces, creating a serious Cold War problem in the Middle East.

On October 29, 1969, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, successfully send the Stanford Research Institute a first-of-its-kind electronic message on ARPANET, the forerunner of the modern internet.

Duane Allman, a slide guitarist and the leader of the Allman Brothers Band, is killed on October 29, 1971 when he loses control of his motorcycle and drives into the side of a flatbed truck in Macon, Georgia. He was 24 years old. After Allman’s death, his band continued to tour and record. In 2004, Rolling Stone declared that the Allman Brothers were the 52nd-greatest rock band of all time.

Nearly four decades after he became the first American to orbit the Earth, Senator John Herschel Glenn Jr. is launched into space again as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery on October 29, 1998. At 77 years of age, Glenn was the oldest human ever to travel in space. During the nine-day mission, he served as part of a NASA study on health problems associated with aging.