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American history, reported as it happened
Made for the 250thOn this day › May 30
What happened on May 30 in American history
May 30 is the 150th day of the year (the 151st in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 14 stories from May 30 spanning 1806 to 2020. Among them: in 1806, Jackson lets the best shot in Tennessee fire first; Dickinson is dead, the bullet still in Jackson's chest; and in 1854, Pierce signs the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Missouri Compromise's thirty-four-year line is gone.
1806Member story · 1776 Club
Jackson lets the best shot in Tennessee fire first; Dickinson is dead, the bullet still in Jackson's chest
Near Adairville, Dickinson's shot broke two ribs and stopped inches from Jackson's heart; bleeding inside a loose coat, Jackson drew the hammer a second time and fired.
1854
Pierce signs the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Missouri Compromise's thirty-four-year line is gone
Douglas's "popular sovereignty" doctrine now lets settlers in both territories vote on slavery themselves, erasing the 36°30' ban that has held since 1820.
1862Member story · 1776 Club
Union patrols walk into Corinth and find it empty; Beauregard's army slipped out in the night
Beauregard ran empty trains through town all night, whistles shrieking and troops cheering, while his 45,000 men marched south toward Tupelo, leaving Halleck's 120,000 with a ghost town.
1868
Logan names May 30 a national day to decorate soldiers' graves; the order goes to every post in the Union
General Order No. 11 puts the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic behind a practice Southern women began two years ago.
1883Member story · 1776 Club
A woman stumbles on the stair; twelve are crushed to death on the Brooklyn Bridge
The bridge had been open six days when a crowd collapsed into itself at the Brooklyn approach, killing at least a dozen of the people it was built to serve.
1899Member story · 1776 Club
Pearl Hart stops the Globe stage; she hands every passenger a dollar before she rides off
Dressed in men's clothes and armed, Hart and partner Joe Boot take $431.20 and two pistols from the coach near Cane Springs Canyon, thirty miles southwest of Globe.
1914Member story · 1776 Club
Aquitania sails from Liverpool; not one passenger pulled out after yesterday's disaster on the St. Lawrence
Captain William Turner takes Cunard's new four-funneled flagship, 45,647 tons, out on her maiden crossing to New York with 1,055 aboard.
1922Member story · 1776 Club
Taft dedicates the Lincoln Memorial; Black guests are marched to a segregated section
Robert Todd Lincoln, 78 and the president's last surviving son, watches from the crowd as Marines enforce the color line at his father's monument.
1937Member story · 1776 Club
Chicago police open fire on steel strikers; four lie dead in the grass at Republic's South Chicago mill
The march began as a picnic, with families and songs, but 300 officers block the road and the shooting starts before the afternoon is out.
1948Member story · 1776 Club
SP&S railway berm collapses; ten-foot wall of water erases Vanport in an afternoon
This morning, Portland's Housing Authority told 18,500 residents the dikes were safe. Tonight, Oregon's second-largest city is under the Columbia.
1958
Eisenhower buries two unknowns at Arlington; each man receives the Medal of Honor
Charette, the Navy's only active enlisted Medal of Honor holder, chose the World War II unknown; Lyle picked the Korean War soldier from four disinterred candidates.
1971Member story · 1776 Club
Mariner 9 lifts off for Mars on an Atlas-Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral
The probe is the first American craft aimed at orbiting another planet; arrival is expected in November.
2005Member story · 1776 Club
Natalee Holloway leaves a nightclub with three men at 1:30 a.m.; the Alabama teen does not come back
Her passport and packed bags sit in her Holiday Inn room. The 18-year-old honor graduate had been in Aruba five days on a trip with 124 classmates.
2020Member story · 1776 Club
Hurley and Behnken ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 off pad 39A; America has astronauts in orbit again
The first U.S. crew to leave Earth on an American rocket since 2011, they lift off aboard a capsule they named Endeavour, ending nine years of buying seats from Russia at up to $80 million each.
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