November 24
Today is
Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.
There are
37 days remaining in 2016.
There are
30 days until Christmas. So, get busy.
Events
1248 – In the middle of the night a mass on the north side of
Mont Granier suddenly collapsed, in one of the largest historical rockslope failures known in Europe, creating the sheer 700 m north face of the mountain.
1429 – Hundred Years' War:
Joan of Arc unsuccessfully
besieges La Charité.
1642 –
Abel Tasman becomes the first European to
discover the island
Van Diemen's Land (later renamed
Tasmania).
1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorizes the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers (which is now the
Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety).
1859 –
Charles Darwin publishes
On the Origin of Species.
1863 – American Civil War:
Battle of Lookout Mountain: Near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under
General Ulysses S. Grant capture
Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city led by
General Braxton Bragg.
1877 –
Anna Sewell's animal welfare novel
Black Beauty is published.
1917 – In Milwaukee, Wisconsin
nine members of the Milwaukee Police Department are killed by a bomb, the most deaths in a single event in U.S. police history until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
1932 – In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the
FBI Crime Lab) officially opens.
1963 – In the first live, televised murder,
Lee Harvey Oswald, the [presumed] assassin of President
John F. Kennedy, is murdered two days after the assassination, by
Jack Ruby, a nightclub operator, in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. Oswald was being led by two detectives to an armoured car to take him to the nearby county jail.
1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself
Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.
1973 – A national speed limit is imposed on the
Autobahn in Germany because of the
1973 oil crisis. The speed limit lasts only four months.
1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete
Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed
"Lucy" (after The Beatles song
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the
Awash Valley of Ethiopia's
Afar Depression.
1976 – The
Çaldıran–Muradiye earthquake in eastern Turkey kills between 4,000 and 5,000 people.
2015 – A Russian Air Force
Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet is
shot down by Turkish Air Force F-16s over the Syria–Turkey border, killing one of the two pilots; a Russian marine is also killed during a subsequent rescue effort.
Births
1690 – Charles Theodore Pachelbel

; 1713 – Junípero Serra; 1784 – Zachary Taylor (12th POTUS); 1806 – William Webb Ellis (created rugby); 1864 – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

; 1867 – Scott Joplin♪ ♫; 1877 – Alben W. Barkley (35th VPOTUS); 1888 – Dale Carnegie (author
How to Win Friends and Influence People); 1897 – Lucky Luciano (mob boss); 1913 – Howard Duff; 1913 – Geraldine Fitzgerald; 1925 – William F. Buckley, Jr.; 1938 – Charles Starkweather; 1940 – Paul Tagliabue; 1941 – Pete Best

; 1941 – Donald "Duck" Dunn

(Booker T. & the M.G.'s); 1942 – Billy Connolly

; 1942 – Marlin Fitzwater; 1945 –
Lee Michaels♪ ♫; 1946 – Ted Bundy; 1947 – Dwight Schultz ('Howlin' Mad Murdock' on
The A-Team); 1950 – Bob Burns

(Lynyrd Skynyrd); 1956 – Ruben Santiago-Hudson (
Castle); 1957 – Denise Crosby ('Tasha Yar' on
Star Trek: TNG); 1962 – John Squire

(The Stone Roses); 1964 – Brad Sherwood (
Whose Line Is It Anyway? (American and British)); 1969 – Rob Nicholson

(Rob Zombie); 1977 – Colin Hanks (
Life In Pieces, Tom Hanks' son); 1978 – Katherine Heigl
Deaths
1916 – Hiram Maxim (invented the Maxim machine gun); 1957 – Diego Rivera

; 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald (presumed assassin of JFK); 1980 – George Raft; 1982 – Barack Obama, Sr. (if
only he'd worn a condom

); 1991 – Freddie Mercury♪ ♫(Queen); 1991 – Eric Carr

(KISS);
1993 – Albert Collins
; 2005 – Pat Morita ("Wax on, wax off."); 2012 – Héctor 'Macho' Camacho