By The Associated Press

Today is Saturday, June 30, the 181st day of 2018. There are 184 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On June 30, 1953, the first Chevrolet Corvette, with its innovative fiberglass body, was built at a General Motors assembly facility in Flint, Michigan.

On this date:

In 1859, French acrobat Charles Blondin (blahn-DAN’) walked back and forth on a tightrope above the gorge of Niagara Falls as thousands of spectators watched.

In 1865, eight people, including Mary Surratt and Dr. Samuel Mudd, were convicted by a military commission of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. (Four defendants, including Surratt, were executed; Mudd was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869.)

In 1908, the Tunguska Event took place in Russia as an asteroid exploded above Siberia, leaving 800 square miles of scorched or blown-down trees.

In 1918, labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)

In 1936, the Civil War novel “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell was first published by The Macmillan Co. in New York.