On This Day for June 30 - Night of the Long Knives, Lena Horne is featured, and more

Created: 2020-06-30 10:03 Updated: 2020-06-30 10:03 Notebook: On this Day in History

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June 30

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

Lena Horne

FEATURED EVENT

1934

Night of the Long Knives

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MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

2001: American musician and record company executive Chet Atkins—who was a major figure in country music, often credited with developing the Nashville Sound of the 1960s—died in Nashville. [ Take our music quiz.]

1985: American swimmer Michael Phelps, the most-decorated Olympic athlete with 28 medals, was born. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about the Olympics.]

1936: American author Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, a sweeping romance set during the Civil War; the novel later won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a hugely successful film. [ Take our quiz about famous authors.]

1960: Zaire, formerly Belgian Congo and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, declared its independence from Belgium. [Test your knowledge of Africa.]

1908: An enormous aerial explosion, presumably caused by a comet fragment colliding with Earth , flattened approximately 2,000 square km (500,000 acres) of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. [Read more about this and six other strange disasters.]

1893: The Excelsior diamond—which, weighing 995 carats, was the largest uncut diamond ever found to that time—was discovered in the De Beers mine at Jagersfontein, Orange Free State.

SEE ALL EVENTS ON THIS DAY

ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1966

Mike Tyson
American boxer

1985

Michael Phelps
American swimmer

1942

Robert Ballard
American oceanographer

1917

Buddy Rich
American musician

1917

Lena Horne
American singer and actress