September 30

Today in American History

Events in History

1935 The Boulder Dam (later the Hoover Dam), astride the border of Arizona and Nevada, is dedicated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt

1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz's B-17 finds Guadalcanal using a National Geographic map

1953 Earl Warren appointed Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court

1961 Bill for Boston Tea Party is paid by Mayor Snyder of Oregon who wrote a check for $196, the total cost of all tea lost

1962 JFK sends 3,000 federal troops to University of Mississippi to quell riots protesting desegregation [1]

1962 Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez founds the United Farm Workers

1980 Ethernet specifications published by Xerox working with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation [1]

1993 US Army General Colin Powell retires at 56

1631 William Stoughton, American judge at the Salem witch trials (d. 1701)
1805 Samuel Peter Heintzelman, American Major General (Union Army), born in Manheim, Pennsylvania (d. 1880)
1827 Ellis H. Roberts, American Treasurer of the United States (1897-1905) and politician (Rep-R-New York), born in Utica, New York (d. 1918)
1827 Kenner Garrard, American Brevet Major General (Union Army), born in Bourbon County, Kentucky (d. 1879)
1861 William Wrigley Jr., American industrialist (Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (d. 1932)
1870 Thomas W. Lamont, American banker; father of Corliss Lamont; great-grandfather of Ned Lamont (d. 1948)
1893 Lansdale Ghiselin Sasscer, American politician (REP-Maryland 1939-53), born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland (d. 1964)

American author (Breakfast At Tiffany's; In Cold Blood), born in New Orleans, Louisiana

1927 W. S. Merwin, American poet (17th United States Poet Laureate), born in New York City (d. 2019)

Jewish Auschwitz survivor and author (Night), Nobel Prize winner 1986, born in Sighet, Romania

1945 Bob Lassiter 'Mad Dog', American radio personality, born in Camden, New Jersey (d. 2006)
1946 William Thurston, American mathematician (Fields Medal, 1982), born in Washington, D.C. (d. 2012)
1960 Blanche Lincoln, American politician (Senator-Arkansas 1999-2011, youngest person elected to the Senate at 38), born in Helena, Arkansas
1964 Stephen N. Frick, American naval commander and astronaut, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1966 Kerry G. Johnson, African American graphic designer and caricaturist

1630 John Billington, English-born murderer who sailed on the Mayflower, 1st American executed by Plymouth colony, hanged at about 40

English-born Methodist leader and preacher, dies in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at age 55

1862 Isaac Peace Rodman, American banker and Brigadier General (Union Army), dies of injury at about 40

US First Lady and wife of Teddy Roosevelt, dies at 87

1984 Ellsworth Bunker, US ambassador (South-Vietnam, dies at 90)
1997 Male alligator, largest in Florida (14 feet), killed at about 65
2003 Robert Kardashian, Armenian-American lawyer, dies of cancer at 59
2011 Anwar al-Awlaki, American-born terrorist and Islamist militant (b. 1971)
2014 Martin Lewis Perl, American physicist (1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovery of the tau lepton particle), dies from a heart attack at 87