TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: NOVEMBER 24
1639 1st observation of transit of Venus by Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree – helped establish size of the Solar System
1642 Abel Janzoon Tasman discovers Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)
1859 Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The first printing of 1,250 copies sells out in a single day.
1864 Kit Carson and his 1st Cavalry, New Mexico Volunteers, attack a camp of Kiowa Indians in the First Battle of Adobe Walls.
1871 The National Rifle Association was incorporated in the U.S.
1896 1st US absentee voting law enacted by Vermont
1927 Federal officials battle 1,200 inmates after prisoners in Folsom Prison revolt.
1938 Mexico seizes oil land adjacent to Texas.
1940 Nazis closed off the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Over the next three years the population dropped from 350,000 to 70,000 due to starvation, disease and deportations to concentration camps.
1947 The US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities finds “Hollywood 10” in contempt because of their refusal to reveal whether they were communists
1950 UN troops begin an assault intending to end Korean War by Christmas
1954 1st US Presidential airplane christened
1963 Jack Ruby fatally shoots the accused assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the garage of the Dallas Police Department.
1971 Hijacker Dan Cooper, known as D.B. Cooper, parachuted from a Northwest Airlines 727 over Washington state with $200,000 in ransom.
1974 Most complete early human skeleton (Lucy, Australopithecus) discovered by Donald Johanson, Maurice Taieb, Yves Coppens and Tim White in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression
1979 The United States admits that thousands of troops in Vietnam were exposed to the toxic Agent Orange.
1983 PLO exchanges 6 Israeli prisoners for 4,500 Palestinians & Lebanese
1993 Robert Thompson and Jon Venables (both 11 years old) were convicted of murdering 2-year-old James Bulger of Liverpool, England. They were both sentenced to “indefinite detention.”
1993 The U.S. Congress gave its final approval to the Brady handgun control bill.
1995 Ireland votes 50.28% to 49.72% to end its 70-year-old ban on divorce.
2017 Militant gunmen attack a Sufi mosque in Bir al-Abed on the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, killing 305 people, government retaliates bombing the area
2019 Data leaked from Chinese high-security Muslim Uighur security camps, housing 1 million people, show systematic brainwashing in western Xinjiang region
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
