TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – SEPT 30
1568 Eric XIV, king of Sweden, is deposed after showing signs of madness.
1630 John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel
1659 Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked (according to Defoe)
1846 The first anesthetized tooth extraction is performed by Dr. William Morton in Charleston, Massachusetts.
1862 Prussia Minister President Otto von Bismarck’s delivers his “Blood & Iron” speech
1867 Midway Islands formally declared a US possession
1882 In Appleton, WI, the world’s first hydroelectric power plant began operating.
1938 Under German threats of war, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign an accord permitting Germany to take control of Sudetenland–a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking minority.
1943 The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps becomes the Women’s Army Corps, a regular contingent of the U.S. Army with the same status as other army service corps.
1946 22 Nazi leaders, including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Goering, are found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials
1949 The Berlin Airlift is officially halted after 277,264 flights.
1954 NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.
1955 Actor and teen idol James Dean is killed in a car crash while driving his Porsche on his way to enter it into a race in Salinas, California.
1960 Premier of The Flintstones
1962 U.S. Marshals escort James H. Meredith into the University of Mississippi; two die in the mob violence that follows.
1965 The 30 September Movement unsuccessfully attempts coup against Indonesian government; an anti-communist purge in the aftermath results in over 500,000 deaths.
1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs legislation that establishes the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities.
1976 California enacted the Natural Death Act of California. The law was the first example of right-to-die legislation in the U.S.
1987 Mikhail S. Gorbachev retired President Andrei A. Gromyko from the Politburo and fired other old-guard leaders in a shake-up at the Kremlin.
1998 Gov. Pete Wilson of California signed a bill into law that defined “invasion of privacy as trespassing with the intent to capture audio or video images of a celebrity or crime victim engaging in a personal of family activity.” The law went into effect January 1, 1999.
1999 In Tokaimura, Japan, radiation escaped a nuclear facility after workers accidentally set off an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
2005 Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes controversial cartoon
The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. The publication led to riots and protests in many parts of the world.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
