1929 Is Public Domain In 2025

96 Years Ago
1929

All Movies, Books, Printed Music and Art of 1929 enter the Public Domain on January 1, 2025

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More Mickey, Plus Popeye, Tintin, and More Enter Public Domain

The End of the Roaring Twenties
Prohibition is Still Going On

Picture This in 1929

Woman of Tehuantapec- Photo by Tina Modotti

Salvador Dal –The Lugubrious Game

Edward Hopper – Chop Suey

Harue Koga – The Sea

The Foundation of Perth 1829 is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by George Pitt Morison. It depicts a reconstruction of the ceremony by which the town of Perth, Western Australia was founded on 12 August 1829.

Julio Romero de Torres – La Fuensanta

According to Sotheby’s, the work has been “proclaimed as a quintessential rendition of Andalucian beauty”. It was depicted for 25 years on the 100 peseta banknote.

Hey, 1929 Movies

Released amongst these Historic Events

The Big Transition from Silents to Talkies Takes Place

January 1929

January 7, 1929 – Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (USSR)

January 10, 1929

WTFF (The Fellowship Forum, a station formerly owned by the Ku Klux Klan) in Mt. Vernon, Virginia (modern-day WFED) changes its call letters to WJSV. While the call letters are claimed to stand for “Jesus Saves Virginia”, they actually stand for James S. Vance, a Grand Wizard in the state and publisher of the station’s owner, “The Fellowship Forum” (a shell organization for the KKK). Vance arranges an affiliation deal with CBS Radio, which also involves operations and programming for WJSV..

January 11, 1929

Babe Ruth‘s estranged wife Helen died in a house fire in Watertown, Massachusetts. She had been living for several years with a dentist and was thought by neighbours to have been his wife.

January 22, 1929 – Lady of the Pavements (1929) directed by D. W. Griffith. While the film has a few talking sequences, the majority of the film features a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process.

January 26, 1929- Liberty starring comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

January 27, 1929 – Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) written and directed by Benjamin Christensen

January 1929 – The Manxman (1929) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

February 1929

February 1, 1929

Outstanding Picture The Broadway Melody (1929)
The first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Broadway Melody is released by MGM and becomes the first major musical film of the sound era, sparking a host of imitators as well as a series of Broadway Melody films that will run until 1940.

February 9, 1929 – “Litvinov’s Pact“

The Pact is signed in Moscow by the Soviet Union, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Latvia, who agree not to use force to settle disputes between themselves.

February 11, 1929 – Lateran Treaty,

The Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See of the Catholic Church sign the Lateran Treaty, to establish the Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Rome, resolving the “Roman Question“.

February 14, 1929

“Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre“: Five gangsters (rivals of Al Capone), plus a civilian, are shot dead in Chicago.

February 18, 1929 – The first Academy Awards, or Oscars, are announced for the year ended August 1, 1928.

February 21, 1929 –The Iron Mask (1929)

March 1929

March 2 , 1929

The longest bridge in the world at this time, the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge, opens.

March 22, 1929

The Canadian schooner and rum-runner I’m Alone is sunk by the US Coast Guard‘s USCGC Dexter.

March 25, 1929 –Spite Marriage, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, starring Buster Keaton. It is the second film Keaton made for MGM and his last silent film, although he had wanted it to be a “talkie” or full sound film.

March 30, 1929

Imperial Airways begins operating the first commercial flights between London and Karachi.

March 30, 1929 –The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929 ) Academy Award for Best Art Direction – Cedric Gibbons

March 31, 1929 – Trent’s Last Case (1929) directed by Howard Hawks and starring Raymond Griffith, Marceline Day, Raymond Hatton, and Donald Crisp.

April 1929

April 6, 1929 – The Wild Party directed by Dorothy Arzner (Clara Bow’s first “talkie”)

April 16, 1929

New York Yankees become 1st team to use numbers on uniforms

April 20, 1929 –Big Business starring Laurel and Hardy: The film, largely about tit-for-tat vandalism between Laurel and Hardy as Christmas tree salesmen and the man who rejects them, was deemed culturally significant and entered into the National Film Registry in 1992.

April 17, 1929 – Show Boat, directed by Harry A. Pollard, starring Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut, based on the 1926 novel by Edna Ferber

May 1929

May 4, 1929 Unaccustomed As We Are (1929) Laurel and Hardy’s first sound film.

May 8, 1929 – The Black Watch directed by John Ford. This was his first sound film.

May 18, 1929- Small Talk First Our Gang sound film

Atlantic City Conference held between May 13–16, 1929

This was a historic summit of leaders of organized crime in the United States. It is considered by most crime historians to be the earliest organized crime summit held in the US. The conference had a major impact on the future direction of the criminal underworld and it held more importance and significance than the Havana Conference of 1946 and the Apalachin meeting of 1957. It also represented the first concrete move toward a National Crime Syndicate.

May 23, 1929 (New York City)- The Cocoanuts starring the Marx Brothers

June 1929

June 6 – October 10, 1929

1929 Westlake exposition was opened in China.

July 13, 1929 – The first all color talkie (in Technicolor), On with the Show, is released by Warner Bros. who lead the way in a new color revolution just as they had ushered in that of the talkies.

June 15, 1929 –Railroadin The 88th Our Gang short comedy film and the second to be made with sound.

June 21, 1929

Cristero War: The Mexican government and Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flóres sign an agreement which allowed worship to resume in Mexico and granted three concessions to the Catholics, bringing an end to the Cristero War.

June 23, 1929

300,000 people attend the Pontifical High Mass at the Phoenix Park to mark the end of the Catholic Emancipation centenary celebrations.

June 27, 1929

The first public demonstration of color TV is held, by H. E. Ives and his colleagues at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. The first images are a bouquet of roses and an American flag. A mechanical system is used to transmit 50-line color television images between New York and Washington.

July 1929

July 24, 1929

Union Airways Pty. Ltd. is founded, to be nationalised as South African Airways on 1 February 1934. This was the first South African commercial airline. It was founded by Major Allister Miller, a World War I flying ace, who had recruited some 2000 South Africans for service in the Royal Air Force. The word “Union” referred to the official name of the country at that time: the Union of South Africa.

July 25, 1929

Pope Pius XI emerges from the Apostolic Palace, and enters St. Peter’s Square in a huge procession witnessed by about 250,000 persons, thus ending nearly 60 years of self-imposed status by the papacy as Prisoner in the Vatican.

July 28, 1929 – Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It is frequently cited as the first British sound feature film.

July 31, 1929 – The Karnival Kid (in which Mickey speaks his first words). There were 13 Mickey Mouse Cartoons released in 1929 including sound versions of the Mickey Mouse cartoons The Gallopin’ Gaucho, and Plane Crazy

August 1929

August 3, 1929 – The Cock-Eyed World beats every known gross for any box office attraction throughout the world with a reported first week gross of $173,391 at the Roxy Theatre (New York City).

August 8–29, 1929

German rigid airship LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin makes a circumnavigation of the Northern Hemisphere eastabout out of Lakehurst, New Jersey, including the first nonstop flight of any kind across the Pacific Ocean (Tokyo–Los Angeles).

August 12, 1929

In 1929, Western Australia (WA) celebrated the centenary of the founding of Perth and the establishment of the Swan River Colony, the first permanent European settlement in WA. A variety of events were run in Perth, regional areas throughout the state, and even across Australia such as the Western Australian Centenary Air Race.

In 1929 the Western Mail published a Centenary Issue “2029 Perth”, which included a 1929 artist’s conception of what Perth would look like in 2029.

August 17, 1929- Hotter Than Hot Harry Langdon’s first talkie.

August 20, 1929 – Hallelujah! is the first Hollywood film to contain an entire black cast.

August 22, 1929 –The Skeleton Dance, a Walt Disney animated short.

August 19, 1929– Amos ‘n Andy debuts on the NBC Blue radio network.

September 1929

September 3, 1929

The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaks at 381.17, a height it would not reach again until November 1954.

September 13, 1929 (New York City)- Flight (1929) Frank Capra

September 15, 1929 – Mickey’s Surprise which is part of Larry Darmour‘s Mickey McGuire series starring a young Mickey Rooney.

September 15, 1929 –Rio Rita (1929)

October 1929

October 3, 1929

The country officially known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes changes its name to Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

October 8–14, 1929

Philadelphia Athletics (AL) defeat Chicago Cubs (NL) to win the 1929 World Series by 4 games to 1.

October 12, 1929 – Welcome Danger starring Harold Lloyd (His First Talkie)

October 15, 1929 – Woman in the Moon (1929) is a German science fiction silent film directed by Fritz Lang, and written by his wife Thea von Harbou, based on her 1928 novel The Rocket to the Moon.

October 24–29 – Wall Street Crash of 1929
Start of the Great Depression

October 29, 1929

The US stock market crash causes a fall in coffee quotations to 60% in Brazil.

October 29, 1929 – Released in the U.S. is the first sound film adaptation of a Shakespeare play: The Taming of the Shrew, starring Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks.

November 1929

November 8, 1929 – The Miraculous Life of Thérèse Martin (La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin), directed by Julien Duvivier – (France)

November 15, 1929

The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929)– (Germany)

Atlantic, a film drama about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, is released in the U.K. The simultaneously-shot German-language version is the first sound film feature to be released in Germany.

November 16, 1929 –The Kiss (1929) Garbo’s, and MGM’s, last silent picture

November 29, 1929– The Rise of the Goldbergs (later called just The Goldbergs), starring Gertrude Berg, debuts on NBC.

November 29, 1929

Bernt Balchen, U.S. Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Captain Ashley McKinley and Harold June become the first to fly over the South Pole.

December 1929

New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe popularizes Bingo after coming across the game of “Beano” in Atlanta, Georgia. After someone accidentally yells “bingo” instead of “beano” with a group of friends in Brooklyn, New York, he begins production of the game, going on to develop more than 6,000 card combinations under the E. S. Lowe company, as the popularity of the game grows to become a national pastime.^[

December 1929 – The Singing Brakeman, a short featuring Jimmie Rodgers

December 13, 1929 –Dynamite, directed by Cecil B. DeMille

December 27 , 1929

Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin orders the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”.

1929 Books Hot of the Press

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Lost Empire (Book 12 out of 24)
Hardy Boys # 7. The Secret of the Caves (1929) in the Hardy Boys Series by Franklin W Dixon
Hardy Boys # 8. The Mystery of Cabin Island (1929) by Franklin W Dixon

“The Disintegration Machine” (1929) Professor Challenger Story by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Courrier sud (Southern Mail)
Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge II Laughing Boy (1929) —won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1930)
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Rachel Field – Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

Tom Swit # 32. Tom Swift and His House On Wheels (1929) aka A Trip around the Mountain of Mystery by Howard Garisy
Wanda Gág–The Funny Thing
Robert Graves – Good-bye to All That
Graham Greene – The Man Within (1929) His first Novel
Patrick Hamilton – Rope
Dashiell Hammett – Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
Richard Hughes – A High Wind in Jamaica
Erich Kästner – Emil and the Detectives (Emil und die Detektive) (1929)
Eric Philbrook Kelly – The Trumpeter of Krakow (1929)

Walter Lippmann – A Preface to Morals
Maud Hart Lovelace–Early Candlelight
Marian Hurd McNeely,-The Jumping-Off Place
Beatrix Potter-The Fairy Caravan
Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee) – The Roman Hat Mystery
Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet (only the original German version, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)
Felix Salten–Fifteen Rabbits
John Steinbeck‘s first book – Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, With Occasional Reference to History

Ruth Plumly Thompson – Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (23rd in the Oz series overall and the ninth written by her)
Alison Uttley – The Squirrel, The Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit (1929) (introducing Little Grey Rabbit)
Arthur Wesley Wheen – the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
E. B. White and James Thurber – Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

Father Ronald Knox codifies the “rules” for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in a “Decalogue” introducing The Best Detective Stories of 1928–1929

The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story. (Note: This is a reference to the common use of heavily stereotyped Asian characters in detective fiction of the time)
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective himself must not commit the crime.
The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Dame Agatha Christie

( September 15, 1890 – 12 January 12,1976)

Tommy and Tuppence
2. Partners in Crime (1929)

Superintendent Battle
2. The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

The 1929 Funny Pages And Magazines

January 7, 1929

Tarzan of the Apes, a newspaper comic strip adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs character of Tarzan, was first published.
The newspaper comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. premiered.

January 10, 1929 – The Adventures of Tintin begin with the first appearance of Hergé‘s Belgian comic book hero in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter…, au pays des Soviets), serialized in the children’s newspaper supplement Le Petit Vingtième.