TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JUNE 30
1097 The Crusaders defeated the Turks at Dorylaeum.
1520 Montezuma II is murdered as Spanish conquistadors flee the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan during the night.
1857 Charles Dickens reads from A Christmas Carol at St. Martin’s Hall in London–his first public reading.
1894 Korea declared independence from China and asked for Japanese aid.
1908 A mysterious explosion, possibly the result of a meteorite, levels thousands of trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia with a force approaching twenty megatons.
1921 President Warren G. Harding appointed former president William H. Taft chief justice of the United States.
1922 Irish rebels in London assassinate Sir Henry Wilson, the British deputy for Northern Ireland.
1934 Adolf Hitler orders the purge of his own party in the “Night of the Long Knives.”
1936 Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, is published.
1937 Adolf Hitler meets a number of American Businessmen in Berlin and tells them there will be no war Germany can not afford a war and does not a war, most believe his sincere style.
1953 The first Corvette rolled off the Chevrolet assembly line in Flint, MI. It sold for $3,250.
1955 The U.S. began funding West Germany’s rearmament.
1958 The U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing the admission of Alaska as the 49th state in the Union.
1971 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent the Washington Post or the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers.
1971 Three Soviet cosmonauts die when their spacecraft depressurizes during reentry.
1971 The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified when Ohio became the 38th state to approve it. The amendment lowered the minimum voting age to 18.
1974 Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto, Canada.
1985 Thirty Nine American hostages being held captive by the Shia Muslim Amal militia in Lebanon are released, their freedom was secured after intervention by the Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad.
1986 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states could outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults.
1997 The Colonial flag of Hong Kong is lowered for the last time prior to hand over to China tomorrow on July 1st 1997.
1998 The remains of a Vietnam War serviceman buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers were identified as those of Air Force pilot Michael J. Blassie.
2000 U.S. President Clinton signed the E-Signature bill to give the same legal validity to an electronic signature as a signature in pen and ink.
2007 A green Jeep Cherokee filled with gas cylinders and fuel is crashed through the check in entrance at Glasgow Airport in Scotland where it burst into flames . The unusual and worrying part of the attack was that the terrorists were working as doctors in the British Health Service.
2012 Ansar Dine Islamists have damaged shrines of Muslim saints in the city of Timbuktu. Islamists think of the shrines as idolatrous and are said to have damaged the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud, one of sixteen shrines in the city.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
