January 5, 1930. Russian leader Joseph Stalin declares that all farmland in the Soviet Union will henceforth be “collectively owned” by the people. Russian peasant farmers will now be expected to work on huge state-owned collective farms instead of framing their own small plots of land.

February, 1930. In Spain, General Primero de Rivera resigns his military dictatorship. Riots and labor strikes ensue as the government is in disarray.

February 18, 1930. U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh spots a new planet in our solar system and names it Pluto after the Roman god of the underworld. For more information about the life and history of the planet/non-planet Pluto, see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book, The Pluto Files. Reviewed here by S. Krishna. Reviewed by Carrie at Five Minutes for Books.

February 26, 1930. New York City installs traffic lights at Manhattan intersections. The traffic light was developed by black businessman Garrett A. Morgan, who also invented the gas mask.

April 6, 1930. Mahatma Gandhi reaches the coast after a 240-mile protest march across India. There he breaks British laws by making salt in a protest against the British salt tax, a tax that Gandhi has chosen as the first target of satyagraha, his program of non-violent protest and civil disobedience. Read more at Wikipedia about the Salt March.

April 24, 1930. Amy Johnson arrives in Darwin, Australia, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. The 10,000 mile flight took the aviator nineteen days in her aircraft called Gipsy Moth.

September 14, 1930. National Socialists (Nazis) win 107 seats in the German Parliament (18.3% of all the votes), making them the second largest party in Germany.

October, 1930. Dr. Gertulio Vargas takes power in Brazil after a revolt topples the President-elect, Dr. Julio Prestes and his party which has ruled Brazil for the past forty years.

December, 1930. Dr. Karl Landsteiner wins the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in identifying the major blood types: A, B, AB, and O.

Sometime in 1930: The chocolate chip cookie is accidentally invented by Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, Massachusetts. “Wakefield is said to have been making chocolate cookies and on running out of regular baker’s chocolate, substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé thinking that they would melt and mix into the batter. They did not and the chocolate chip cookie was born.”