April 30 in History

Roger de Flor, also known as Ruggero/Ruggiero da Fiore or Rutger von Blum or Ruggero Flores, was an Italian military adventurer and condottiere active in Aragonese Sicily, Italy, and the Byzantine Empire. He was the commander of the Great Catalan Company and held the title Count of Malta.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four Spanish transatlantic voyages in the name of the Catholic Monarchs, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas. His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Juan de Oñate y Salazar (1550-1626) was a Novohispanic conquistador, explorer and viceroy of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México in the viceroyalty of New Spain, in the present-day U.S. state of New Mexico. He led early Spanish expeditions to the Great Plains and Lower Colorado River Valley, encountering numerous indigenous tribes in their homelands there. Oñate founded settlements in the province, now in the Southwestern United States.

The Eighty Years' War or Dutch Revolt was an armed conflict in the Habsburg Netherlands between disparate groups of rebels and the Spanish government. The causes of the war included the Reformation, centralisation, excessive taxation, and the rights and privileges of the Dutch nobility and cities.

The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana by the United States from the French First Republic in 1803. This consisted of most of the land in the Mississippi River's drainage basin west of the river. In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile ($7/km2), the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi of land now in the Central United States. However, France only controlled a small fraction of this area, most of which was inhabited by Native Americans; effectively, for the majority of the area, the United States bought the preemptive right to obtain Indian lands by treaty or by conquest, to the exclusion of other colonial powers.

Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is a country in Central America, comprising 130,370 square kilometers (50,340 sq mi). With a population of 7,097,329 as of 2026, it is the third-most populous country in Central America after Guatemala and Honduras, and the largest by area in all of Central America.

The French Foreign Legion is a corps of the French Army created to allow foreign nationals into French service. The Legion was founded in 1831 and today consists of several specialities, namely infantry, cavalry, engineers, and airborne troops. It formed part of the Armée d'Afrique, French Army units associated with France's colonial project in North Africa, until the end of the Algerian War in 1962.

The Camp Grant massacre, on April 30, 1871, was an attack on Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches who surrendered to the United States Army at Camp Grant, Arizona, along the San Pedro River. The massacre led to a series of battles and campaigns fought between the Americans, the Apache, and their Yavapai allies, which continued into 1875, the most notable being General George Crook's Tonto Basin Campaign of 1872 and 1873.

Sir Joseph John Thomson was a British physicist. He received the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases." In 1897, he showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio. The electron was the first subatomic particle to be discovered.

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

The Federal Prison Camp, Alderson is a minimum-security United States federal prison for female inmates in West Virginia. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice.

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network, serving as the flagship property of NBC Entertainment, a division of NBCUniversal, which is a subsidiary of Comcast. It is one of NBCUniversal's two flagship subsidiaries, alongside Universal Studios. It is the first and oldest major broadcast network in the United States.

The Führerbunker was an air raid shelter located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. It was part of a subterranean bunker complex constructed in two phases in 1936 and 1944. It was the last of the Führer Headquarters used by Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Stalag Luft I was a German World War II prisoner-of-war (POW) camp near Barth, Western Pomerania, Germany, for captured Allied airmen. The presence of the prison camp is said to have shielded the town of Barth from Allied bombing. About 9,000 airmen – 7,588 American and 1,351 British and Canadian – were imprisoned there when it was liberated on the night of 30 April 1945 by Soviet troops.

Bogotá is the capital and largest city of Colombia. The city is administered as the Capital District, as well as the capital of, though not politically part of, the surrounding department of Cundinamarca. Bogotá is a territorial entity of the first order, with the same administrative status as the departments of Colombia. It is the main political, economic, administrative, industrial, cultural, aeronautical, technological, scientific, medical, educational and airport center of the country and northern South America.

The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the full title of which is the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, is a 1956 United Nations treaty which builds upon the 1926 Slavery Convention, which is still operative and which proposed to secure the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade, and the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, which banned forced or compulsory labour, by banning debt bondage, serfdom, child marriage, servile marriage, and child servitude.

The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 arose from the refusal of the Bristol Omnibus Company to employ Black or Asian bus crews in the city of Bristol, England. In line with many other British cities at the time, there was widespread racial discrimination in housing and employment against so-called "Coloureds". An organization later named the West Indian Development Council was founded by Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans, Prince Brown, and led by youth worker Paul Stephenson as group spokesperson. Guy Reid-Bailey would later become a member. The West Indian Development Council was created to end the discriminatory colour bar policy at the Bristol Omnibus Company, which prevented Black and Asian workers from operating the buses. The West Indian Development Council started a boycott of the company's buses by Bristolians, which lasted for four months until the company and union backed down and overturned their policy.

Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was captured by North Vietnam on 30 April 1975. This caused the evacuation of thousands of civilians and U.S. personnel, and ended the Vietnam War. The aftermath ushered in a transition period under the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam until the formal reunification in 1976.

Beatrix is a member of the Dutch royal house who reigned as Queen of the Netherlands from 30 April 1980 until her abdication in 2013.

The Bijon Setu massacre refers to the killing of 16 sadhus and a sadhvi of the Ananda Marga, at Bijon Setu, West Bengal, India, on 30 April 1982. The killings remain unresolved, with no convictions, and continue to be the subject of political controversy.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also called European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, a western suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. It comprises 25 member states. Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only full member geographically out of Europe. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.

The 1999 London nail bombings were a series of bomb explosions in London, England. Over three successive weekends between 17 and 30 April 1999, homemade nail bombs were detonated in Brixton in south London; at Brick Lane, Spitalfields, in the East End; and at the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho in the West End. Each bomb contained up to 1,500 100-millimetre (3.9 in) nails in duffel bags that were left in public spaces. The bombs killed three people and injured 140 people, four of whom lost limbs.

During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.

FCA US, LLC, doing business as Stellantis North America and known historically as Chrysler Corporation, is one of the "Big Three" automobile manufacturers in the United States, headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan. It is the American subsidiary of the multinational automotive company Stellantis. Stellantis North America sells vehicles worldwide under the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram Trucks nameplates. It also includes Mopar, its automotive parts and accessories division, and SRT, its performance automobile division. The division also distributes Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Maserati vehicles in North America.

On 30 April 2012, a ferry carrying about 350 passengers capsized in the Brahmaputra River in the Dhubri district of Assam in Northeast India. The disaster killed at least 108 people.

On 30 April 2014, a bomb-and-knife attack occurred in the Chinese city of Ürümqi, Xinjiang. The terrorist attack killed 3 people, and injured 79 others. The attack coincided with the conclusion of a visit by Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party to the region.