January 30 ...

In 1649 England's King Charles I was beheaded. In 1798 the first brawl in the US House occurred when Rep. Matthew Lyon (DR-VT) and Rep. Roger Griswold (F-CT) fought each other on the House floor after Lyon spat in Griswold's face. Lyon later served in the House from both Kentucky and Arkansas, and is the only person in history to represent three different states in the US House of Representatives. In 1815 President James Madison approved an act of Congress appropriating $23,950 to purchase Thomas Jefferson's library of 6,487 volumes in order to replace the Library of Congress, which was destroyed by the British during the War of 1812. In 1835 the first assassination attempt against a US president in history occurred when a mentally ill man named Richard Lawrence attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson in the United States Capitol. Both of Lawrence's pistols misfired, and a crowd including Rep. Davy Crockett subdued Lawrence. It is reported that Jackson assisted in subduing his attempted assassin, striking him several times with his cane. The prosecuting attorney at Lawrence's trial was Francis Scott Key. In 1862 the US Navy's first ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, was launched. In 1882 32nd president of the US Franklin D. Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, NY. In 1901 female Prohibitionists smashed 12 saloons in Kansas. In 1909 radical writer Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago, IL. In 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor by President von Hindenburg; on the same day, Hitler told the Reichstag that Germany was withdrawing its signature from the Versailles Treaty. Also on this day, the first episode of the Lone Ranger radio program was broadcast on station WXYZ in Detroit. The program ran for 2,956 episodes and ended in 1955. In 1941 Vice President Dick Cheney was born in Lincoln, NE. In 1948 Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist. In 1964 the United States launched Ranger 6. The unmanned spacecraft carried television cameras and was intentionally crash-landed on the moon. The cameras did not return any pictures to Earth. In 1965 Winston Churchill's state funeral was held in London. In 1968 the Tet Offensive began as Communist forces launched surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals. In 1969 the Beatles played publicly for the last time at a free concert in London on the roof of their Apple corporate headquarters. In 1979 the civilian government of Iran announced it had decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who'd been living in exile in France, to return. In 1981 an estimated two million New Yorkers turned out for a ticker-tape parade honoring the freed American hostages from Iran. In 2004 Iraqis voted in their country's first free election in a half-century.