This Day in History

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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