Today In History 30JUNE2014

June 30

1520		Montezuma II is murdered as Spanish conquistadors flee the Aztec capital of Tenochtilan during the night.
1857		Charles Dickens reads from A Christmas Carol at St. Martin's Hall in London–his first public reading.
1859		Jean Francois Gravelet aka Emile Blondin, a French daredevil, becomes the first man to walk across Niagra Falls on a tightrope.
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.
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.
1948		John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrate their invention, the transistor, for the first time.
1960		Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho, opens.
1971		Three Soviet cosmonauts die when their spacecreaft depressurizes during reentry.
Born on June 30
1685		John Gay, poet and playwright (The Beggar's Opera).
1768		Elizabeth Kortright, later Elizabeth Monroe, first lady to U.S. President James Monroe.
1911		Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and critic.
1917		Lena Horne, American singer.
1919		Susan Hayward, actress.
1926		Paul Berg, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist.
1932		Mongo Beti, novelist and political writer.