1960The Congo becomes independent from Belgium
For more than half a century Belgium ruled the vast Congo basin, first as the private property of King Leopold II and then, from 1908, as a colony. Few Congolese were allowed higher education or a share in government, and as late as the mid-1950s Belgian planners imagined independence decades away. Riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 changed the timetable. At a round-table conference in Brussels in early 1960 Belgium agreed to hand over power within months, and elections that May made Joseph Kasavubu head of state and the nationalist Patrice Lumumba prime minister.
On 30 June 1960 King Baudouin came to Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, to proclaim the independence of the Republic of the Congo. His speech praised the work of Leopold II and of Belgian colonisers. Lumumba, who had not been expected to speak, answered with a fierce account of the humiliations Congolese people had suffered under colonial rule, which delighted many listeners and alarmed Belgium. Within a week the army had mutinied against its Belgian officers, and the new state slid into the long Congo Crisis. The Democratic Republic of the Congo still celebrates 30 June as its Independence Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Belgian Congo ↗
1936Haile Selassie appeals to the League of Nations
In October 1935 Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia, one of the only African countries still free of European rule and, like Italy, a member of the League of Nations. The League condemned the attack and imposed limited economic sanctions, but it did not stop Italy’s oil supplies, and Italian forces used aircraft and poison gas against Ethiopian troops and civilians. In May 1936 they took Addis Ababa, and the emperor Haile Selassie went into exile.
On 30 June 1936 the emperor stood before the League’s Assembly in Geneva. He began in French and then spoke in Amharic, describing the gas attacks and asking the member states whether they would honour their promise to protect a small nation against a powerful one. The League did not act: within weeks its members lifted their sanctions against Italy. The speech made Haile Selassie a world figure and is remembered as a warning of the failure of collective security in the years before the Second World War. He returned to Addis Ababa in 1941, after British and Ethiopian forces drove the Italians out.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: UN Archives Geneva: Ethiopia, speech by the Emperor Haile Selassie to the League Assembly ↗
1934Hitler purges the SA in the Night of the Long Knives
Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in January 1933, but his power was not yet complete. The Nazi storm troopers, the SA, had grown to some three million men under their chief of staff Ernst Röhm, who talked of a ‘second revolution’ and wanted his brownshirts to absorb the regular army. The generals, business leaders and the ageing President Hindenburg were alarmed, and Hitler needed their support.
Early on 30 June 1934 Hitler himself led a raid on SA leaders gathered at a resort hotel at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria, while SS units and the Gestapo arrested and shot people across Germany. Röhm was killed in his cell on 1 July. The killings reached far beyond the SA: among the victims were the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, and Gregor Strasser, once Hitler’s rival within the party. The exact number killed has never been established. Hitler justified the murders as the crushing of a plot, the army stood aside, and when Hindenburg died in August Hitler took the presidency as well, with the soldiers swearing an oath of loyalty to him personally.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Night of the Long Knives ↗
1864Lincoln signs the Yosemite Grant
The Ahwahneechee people had lived in Yosemite Valley for generations before a militia unit entered it in 1851, during a campaign to drive them out. Within a few years tourists were arriving to see its granite cliffs and waterfalls, and the giant sequoias of the nearby Mariposa Grove, and settlers began to claim land. A group of Californians, worried that the valley would be fenced off and exploited, asked their senator John Conness to protect it.
In the middle of the Civil War, on 30 June 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the act granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California, on condition that they be held ‘for public use, resort, and recreation’ for all time. It was the first time the US government had set aside land specifically so that it could be preserved and enjoyed by the public, an idea that led to the world’s first national park at Yellowstone in 1872. California handed the valley back to the federal government in 1906, when it became part of Yosemite National Park.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Park Service: Yosemite Grant Act of 1864 ↗
1520The Spaniards flee Tenochtitlan on La Noche Triste
Hernán Cortés and his Spanish soldiers had been received in Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, in November 1519, and soon made the emperor Moctezuma II their prisoner. In 1520, while Cortés was away on the coast, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado attacked Mexica nobles during the festival of Toxcatl and killed many of them. The city rose in revolt. When Cortés returned, the Spaniards were besieged in their palace, and Moctezuma died during the fighting.
The Spaniards decided to break out under cover of darkness along one of the causeways that linked the island to the mainland. On the night of 30 June 1520 (some accounts give the night of 30 June to 1 July) they were spotted, and Mexica warriors attacked from canoes and the causeway. Hundreds of Spaniards and many more of their Tlaxcalan allies were killed or drowned, many weighed down by looted gold. The Spaniards remembered it as La Noche Triste, the ‘Sad Night’. The survivors reached Tlaxcala, regrouped, and returned the next year to besiege and destroy the city.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Noche Triste ↗
