Dec. 30 history: Gadsden Purchase

In 1853, James Gadsden, the U.S. minister to Mexico, and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the president of Mexico, sign the Gadsden Purchase in Mexico City. The treaty settled the dispute over the location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, and established the final boundaries of the southern United States. For the price of $15 million, later reduced to $10 million, the United States acquired approximately 30,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona. 

In 1875, Mississippi state senator Charles Caldwell was assassinated by a mob of white men in Clinton, just west of the state's capital in Jackson. The blacksmith had been one of the 16 black Republican delegates who participated in the 1868 Constitutional Convention, which wrote a constitution to integrate public schools, legalize interracial marriages, give the vote to all adult men and ensure property rights, regardless of race or gender. Mississippi voters, however, rejected the constitution.

In 1903, a fire in the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois, kills more than 600 people on December 30, 1903. It was the deadliest theater fire in U.S. history. Blocked fire exits and the lack of a fire-safety plan caused most of the deaths.

In 1922, in post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.

In 1936, in one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. The autoworkers were striking to win recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the only bargaining agent for GM's workers; they also wanted to make the company stop sending work to non-union plants and to establish a fair minimum wage scale, a grievance system and a set of procedures that would help protect assembly-line workers from injury. In all, the strike lasted 44 days.

In 1968, The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, ran an advertisement on this day in 1968 for a concert at Gonzaga University featuring "The Vanilla Fudge, with Len Zefflin" - a concert of which a bootleg recording would later emerge that represents the first-ever live Led Zeppelin performance captured on tape. (History.com 12/30/31)