This Day in History – 30th June

This Day in History is DUE’s daily dose of trivia for all the history buffs out there. So sit back and take a ride to all the fascinating things that happened today!

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in people, and hence, every day has been a significant one in the foibles of History. Let’s take a tour of “This Day in History – 30th of June”.

1860 The Theory of Evolution being debated upon for the first time

The famous debate on Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution held at the Oxford University Museum and dominated by arguments between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.

1908 Tunguska Fireball is witnessed

A giant fireball, most likely caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet flattens 80 million trees near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, in the largest impact event in recorded history.

1934 “Night of Long Knives” – Adolf Hitler stages a bloody purge of the Nazi party

It was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military.

1936 Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie asks the League of Nations for sanctions against Italy

On this day in History, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) had appealed to the LON of imposing sanctions on Italy for the grave violation of invading Ethiopia however, both Ethiopia and Italy pursued a policy of provocation against each other. The LON ruled against Italy and voted for economic sanctions, but they were never fully applied. Italy ignored the sanctions, quit the League, made special deals with the United Kingdom and France and ultimately annexed and occupied Abyssinia after it had won the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. This came to be known as the Abyssinia crisis.

Read more here.

1936 “Gone with the Wind” gets published

Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone with the Wind” gets published, on this day in History. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era.

1956 Vladimir Lenin’s politics testament (1923) published in Moscow

Lenin’s Testament, formally Letter to the Congress, Russian Pismo K Syezdu, is a two-part document dictated by Vladimir I. Lenin on Dec. 23–26, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, and addressed to a future Communist Party Congress. It contained guideline proposals for changes in the Soviet political system and concise portrait assessments of six-party leaders (Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Y. Zinovyev, Lev B. Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Georgy Pyatakov). On this day in History, it had got published in Moscow, Russia.

2019 President Donald Trump becomes first sitting US president to set foot in North Korea

Trump, on this day in History, became the first sitting US president to set foot in North Korea in the Korean Demilitarized Zone meeting Kim Jong Un. The two men shook hands warmly and expressed hopes for peace when they met for the third time in just over a year on the old Cold War frontier that for decades has symbolized the hostility between their countries, which are technically still at war.

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