August 30

30BC Death: Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. She is said to have committed suicide by allowing a poisonous snake (an asp) to bite her breast.

0257 St Sixtus II begins his reign as Catholic Pope.

1125 Lothair II, Duke of Saxony, is elected king of the Germans.

1146 WMD: A conference of European leaders outlaws the crossbow. It is hoped that by banning the weapon, wars will eventually end. Despite the prohibition, crossbows continue to be used until the 16th century, when the entire cycle is repeated with firearms.

1483 Death: Louis XI king of France (1461-83), aged 60.

1637 Colonial religious teacher Anne Hutchinson, aged 46, is charged with 'traducing (degrading) the ministry' and is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Moving the following year to Rhode Island, then to New York, Anne and her family are killed by Indians in 1643.

1682 William Penn sails from England. He will later establish the colony of Pennsylvania.

1721 The Peace of Nystad ends the Second Northern War between Sweden and Russia, giving Russia considerably more power in the Baltic region.

1748 Birth: Jacques-Louis David, in France, Neoclassical painter (Death of Marat, above).

1780 US Revolutionary War: General Benedict Arnold secretly promises to surrender West Point, of which he is the commander, to the British army.

1781 US Revolutionary War: A French fleet of 24 ships under the Comte de Grasse defeat the British under Admiral Graves at the battle of Chesapeake Capes. (Great link, it has a pop-up, but worth it if the topic interests you.)

1797 Birth: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in London, England, English novelist, author, daughter of early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of Percy Shelley, she eloped with and married him in 1816. Best known for her philosophical horror story Frankenstein (1818) or the Modern Prometheus. She died in 1851.

1813 Creek Indians massacre over 500 whites at Fort Mims, Alabama.

1837 Birth: Ellen Lewis Arthur [Herndon], wife of 21st US President Chester A. Arthur. Died in 1880.

1850 Honolulu, Hawaii becomes a chartered as a city.

1852 Birth: Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff, in the Netherlands, physical chemist (Nobel 1901).

1860 American George Francis Train is instrumental in the design and building of the first British tramway, inaugurated this day by The Birkenhead Street Railway.

1861 US Civil War: As the dark clouds of civil war gather over the nation and two aggressive factions plot to gain political control of Missouri and its most important city, St. Louis, Union General John Fremont declares martial law throughout Missouri and makes his own emancipation proclamation to free slaves in the state. Note: President Lincoln will overrule the general.

1862 US Civil War: The Second Battle of Bull Run concludes as Confederate forces under General Stonewall Jackson emerge victorious.

1871 Birth: Ernest Rutherford (Baron Rutherford), the physicist who will discover and name alpha, beta and gamma radiation and is the first to achieve a man-made nuclear reaction. While at Cambridge, his work will establish the foundations of modern atomic science.

1879 Death: John B. Hood, confederate general (lost Atlanta), aged 48.

1884 Birth: Theodor Svedberg, in Sweden, chemist, will work with colloids (Nobel 1926).

1885 13,000 meteors are seen in 1 hour near Andromeda.

1888 Lord Walsingham kills 1070 grouse in a single day.

1892 The Moravia, a passenger ship arriving from Germany, brings cholera to the United States.

1893 Birth: Esther Cleveland, daughter of US President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland; 1st child of a US President to be born at the White House.

1893 Birth: Huey P. Long, Louisiana politician who will serve as governor and US senator, AKA 'The Kingfish'.

1901 Birth: Roy Wilkins, civil rights leader, director (NAACP). Died in 1981.

1901 Scotsman Herbert Cecil Booth patents the vacuum cleaner.

1914 WW1: The Battle of Tannenberg, one of history's great military disasters, concludes after the Russian Second Army is enveloped and crushed by the Germans, losing 30,000 troops.

1916 WW1: Turkey declares war on Romania.

1916 WW1: Paul Von Hindenburg becomes chief-of-General-Staff in Germany.

1918 Russian Revolution: Lenin, new leader of Soviet Russia, after speaking at the Michelson factory in Moscow, is shot and wounded by Fanya Kaplan and her accomplice sister Dora, both supposedly members of the Social Revolutionary Party. He will never completely recover. Kaplan is quickly executed without trial. (Polyakov)

1918 WW1: The Anzacs penetrate across the Somme, disrupting Ludendorff's plan for an orderly withdrawal. The German situation rapidly deteriorates, necessitating a retreat to the final position: The Hindenburg Line.

1918 WW1: General Pershing, having won his fight for a separate and distinct US army operating on its own assigned front, moves toward the Saint-Mihiel salient. The Americans are supported by an Allied air force of about 1,400 planes, American, French, Italian, and Portuguese, under US Colonel Billy Mitchell.

1920 The Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) is founded in Prague.

1928 The Independence of the India League is established in India by Jawaharlal Nehru.

1927 Standard Oil agrees to embark on a cooperative program of research and development with I.G. Farben to improve the quality and quantity of gasoline produced from German coal by the hydrogenation process, which had been discovered by a German scientist in 1909, but never fully developed. Note: Germany has no native gasoline production capabilities and this is said to be one of the main reasons it lost World War I. (Borkin)

1930 Death: William H. Taft, 27th US President.

1932 Hermann Goering, with backing from the Catholic Center Party, becomes President of the Reichstag.

1933 The Union of German National Jews in a published statement blames the World Zionist Organization for German Jewry's present predicament. (Edelheit)

1938 Late in the month, Max Warburg, his wife, Alice, and their daughter, Gisela, depart Germany for New York. First they will make a stop-over in London. (See September 1938) (Warburgs)

1939 -02: The Warsaw government orders the Polish army to fully mobilize. Drastic measures are taken to stop any possible sabotage by pro-Germans. (Edelheit)

1939 -02: Ambassador Henderson is advised by the Home Office that Hitler's demand for the arrival of a Polish plenipotentiary that day is unreasonable. Henderson and Ribbentrop meet again, and this time come close to blows. Ribbentrop goes over Hitler's latest proposals, but Henderson claims Ribbentrop refuses to give him a copy of the text.

1939 -02: Hitler agrees to Britain's request for a 24-hour extension to permit a Polish negotiator to meet with von Ribbentrop.

1939 -02: Beck tells Ambassador Kennard that Polish mobilization will resume at midnight. By 4.30 PM. all Polish towns are covered with posters summoning all men up to the age of 40 to report for enlistment. (Howarth)

1939 -02: The British Foreign Office sends a message at 5:30 PM to Berlin after it receives reports of German sabotage in Poland. It says in part, "Germany must exercise complete restraint if Poland is to do so as well."

1939 -02: The great evacuation of children from British cities begins.

1940 WW2: RAF 303 Kosciuszko Fighter Squadron, begins operations in Britain when a Polish pilot shoots down a German bomber during a training flight; now that's training! The 303 will be credited with 126 kills: the highest in Fighter Command.

1940 WW2: The Arbitration of Vienna transfers half of Romanian Transylvania to Hungary, and part of the province of Dobruja to Bulgaria. Hitler had been concerned that these territorial disputes among the Balkan nations might give the Soviets an opportunity for further intervention, endangering Hitler's plans for the Romanian oil fields.

1942 WW2: Rommel is repulsed at Alam Halfa, Egypt.

1943 Birth: Robert Crumb, cartoonist (Father Time).

1944 WW2: In Romania, the Russian army captures the important oil fields of Ploesti from the Germans, thus depriving them of a source of military fuel. Soviet troops enter Bucharest as a new Romanian regime declares war on Germany 

1944 WW2: General de Gaulle's Provisional Government is established in Paris.

1945 Hong Kong s liberated when the British navy under Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt sail into Victoria harbor to accept the Japanese surrender.

1945 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: Rudolf Hess is the first of twenty-two German defendants charged as war criminals. (Children)

1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: Testimony is completed in the Major War Criminals Trial. (Maser II)

1949 Cold War: The Western powers consolidate their sectors into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), a constitutional democracy. The Soviets establish the Communist-run German Democratic Republic in their eastern zone.

1951 The Philippines and the United States sign a defense pact.

1956 A white mob prevents the enrollment of blacks at Mansfield HS, Texas.

1960 A partial blockade is imposed on West Berlin by East Germany.

1961 President John F. Kennedy appoints General Lucius D. Clay as his personal representative in Berlin.

1963 Cold War: The 'hotline' between the White House and the Kremlin goes on line. It is hoped that a direct line of communication will head off misunderstandings that might result in an accidental nuclear war.

1973 Kenya finally bans the hunting of elephants and the trade in ivory.

1979 In the first recorded event of its kind, a comet collides against the sun, releasing an energy amount equal to that of 1 million extremely large hydrogen bombs. The comet, larger than the Earth, had been trapped by the Sun's gravity and, after the explosion, the debris scattered for millions of miles in the Sun's atmosphere.

1979 President Jimmy Carter s attacked by a rabid rabbit on a canoe trip in Plains, Georgia, and the press makes a big deal out of it.

1981 In a Middle East manifestation of Term Limits for elected officials, Iranian President Mohammad Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar are killed in a bomb blast at the prime ministers office in Tehran.

1982 PLO leader Yasser Arafat abandons his headquarters in Beirut following an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

1984 President Ronald Reagan, along with Red Barber, Bill Stern, Graham McNamee, Don Dunphy and Ted Husing are inducted into the Sportscasters Hall of Fame, in ceremonies at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

1991 The Soviet republic of Azerbaijan declares its independence.

1993 Businessman Robert Malval is sworn in as Haiti's new prime minister.

1996 The Dutch government ends national service after 187 years.

1999 The residents of East Timor overwhelmingly vote for independence from Indonesia.  The UN announces the result on September 4.

2001 The Australian government ignores intense international pressure and refuses to allow a Norwegian container ship carrying refugees to dock.

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