{"id":17535,"date":"2022-08-30T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-30T05:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=214284"},"modified":"2022-08-30T07:29:08","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T05:29:08","slug":"30-august-on-this-day-in-history","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/30-august-on-this-day-in-history\/","title":{"rendered":"30 August: On this day in history"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Elinor Evans\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 30 August 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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30 August 526<\/h3>\n

In Ravenna, the Gothic king Theodoric the Great dies of dysentery, leaving the crown of Italy to his 10-year-old son Athalaric.<\/p>\n

30 August 1659<\/h3>\n

Alexander Lindsay, first Earl of Balcarres, died in exile at Breda. He fought against Prince Rupert at Marston Moor and against the Marquis of Montrose at Alford and Kilsyth before turning Royalist and joining Charles II<\/a>.<\/p>\n

30 August 1791<\/h3>\n

HMS Pandora<\/em> sank after running aground on the Great Barrier Reef. She was returning from a voyage to search for HMS Bounty<\/em><\/a> and the mutineers who had seized her. Thirty of the crew and four Bounty prisoners drowned.<\/p>\n

30 August 1862\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Confederate general Robert E Lee defeated the Federal Army of Virginia under Major General John Pope at the second battle of Bull run.<\/p>\n

30 August 1918:\u00a0Lenin takes a bullet to the lung<\/h3>\n

Fanny Kaplan\u2019s assassination attempt on the Bolshevik leader ends in her execution<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

The evening of 30 August 1918 found\u00a0Lenin<\/a>, as so often, making a speech. With Russia being torn apart by civil war,\u00a0the Bolshevik leader was keen to raise morale among the urban workers who provided the bedrock of his support. That\u00a0evening took him to the Hammer and Sickle engineering factory in suburban\u00a0Moscow. At about 10pm, after a passionate address to hundreds of workers, he was escorted outside towards his car,\u00a0pausing briefly to chat to some activists\u00a0about the current food shortages. It was then that the shooting started.<\/p>\n

According to the official version of\u00a0events, a woman called out to Lenin from\u00a0the crowd before levelling her Browning \u00a0revolver and firing three times. The first shot went through his coat and hit a\u00a0bystander; the second hit his shoulder; the\u00a0third punctured his lung. As horrified\u00a0observers grabbed the unresisting\u00a0assassin, Lenin\u2019s guards heaved his\u00a0unconscious body into the car and made\u00a0for the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

Lenin survived, although he was badly\u00a0wounded and his health arguably never\u00a0recovered. But the real mystery concerns\u00a0his assassin. Fanny Kaplan was a 28-year-old member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, previously allies of the Bolsheviks who had since been suppressed by them. In her confession, she supposedly said: \u201cI had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution,\u201d and insisted she had acted alone, a claim many historians find implausible, since she was virtually blind.<\/p>\n

In any case, Kaplan\u2019s fate was sealed. On 3 September she was led into a garage and executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. A few hours later, the Soviet government issued a blood-curdling declaration, announcing that\u00a0it was time to \u201ccrush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror\u201d. The Red Terror had begun. | Written by Dominic Sandbrook<\/strong><\/p>\n

30 August 1940<\/h3>\n

Death of Sir Joseph John Thompson, the British physicist who discovered the electron in 1897 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.<\/p>\n

Browse more On this day in history<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n