TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JAN 30
1487 Bell chimes invented
1649 Charles I of England is beheaded at Whitehall by the executioner Richard Brandon.
1661 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England is ritually executed after having been dead for two years
1781 Articles of Confederation ratified by 13th state, Maryland
1797 Congress refuses to accept 1st petitions from American blacks
1815 Burned US Library of Congress re-established with Thomas Jefferson’s 6,500 volumes
1835 Richard Lawrence misfires at President Andrew Jackson in Washington DC
1844 Richard Theodore Greener becomes the first African American to graduate from Harvard University.
1862 US Navy’s 1st ironclad warship (Monitor) launched
1894 Pneumatic hammer patented by Charles King of Detroit
1901 Women Prohibitionists smash 12 saloons in Kansas.
1912 The British House of Lords opposes the House of Commons by rejecting home rule for Ireland.
1933 Adolf Hitler is named Chancellor by President Paul Hindenburg.
1948 Mahatma Gandhi assassinated by Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse
1953 President Dwight Eisenhower announces that he will pull the Seventh Fleet out of Formosa to permit the Nationalists to attack Communist China.
1956 Martin Luther King Jr’s home bombed
1961 JFK asks for an Alliance for Progress & Peace Corps
1962 2 members of Flying Wallendas’ high-wire act killed when their 7-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit
1964 The Ranger spacecraft, equipped with six TV cameras, is launched to the moon from Cape Canaveral.
1972 Bloody Sunday: 27 unarmed civilians are shot (14 are killed) by the British Army during a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland; this is the highest death toll from a single shooting incident during ‘the Troubles’
1973 KISS plays their 1st show (Coventry Club in Queens NY)
1976 The U.S. Supreme Court bans spending limits in campaigns, equating funds with freedom of speech.
1979 The Iranian civilian government announced that the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini would be allowed to return.
1980 The first-ever Chinese Olympic team arrives in New York for the Winter Games at Lake Placid.
1982 The first computer virus is released “into the wild” Elk Cloner was created by 15-year-old Richard Skrenta as a practical joke
1995 Car bomb explodes in Algiers, 42 killed/296 injured
2003 British-born “shoe bomber” Richard Reid has been sentenced to life in prison after he tried to blow up a transatlantic flight from Paris to Miami.
2014 US Congressman Henry Waxman announced that he would retire from office after serving in Congress for twenty terms.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
