TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: NOV 24
380 Theodosius I makes his adventus, or first formal entry, into Constantinople
1615 French King Louis XIII married Ann of Austria. They were both 14 years old.
1639 1st observation of transit of Venus by Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree – helped establish size of the Solar System
1642 Dutch explorer Abel 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.
1874 Joseph Glidden receives a patent for barbed wire.
1877 Black Beauty is published
1896 1st US absentee voting law enacted by Vermont
1912 Austria denounces Serbian gains in the Balkans; Russia and France back Serbia while Italy and Germany back Austria.
1927 Federal officials battle 1,200 inmates after prisoners in Folsom Prison revolt.
1938 Mexico seizes oil land adjacent to Texas.
1939 In Czechoslovakia, the Gestapo execute 120 students who are accused of anti-Nazi plotting.
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 Un-American Activities Committee finds “Hollywood 10” in contempt because of their refusal to reveal whether they were communists
1949 The Iron and Steel Act nationalizes the steel industry in Britain.
1950 UN troops begin an assault intending to end Korean War by Christmas
1963 Jack Ruby fatally shoots the accused assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the garage of the Dallas Police Department.
1966 400 die of respiratory failure & heart attack in killer NYC smog
1971 D. B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines flight with $200,000.
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
1987 The U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to scrap short- and medium-range missiles. It was the first superpower treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.
1992 US Congress passes the Brady Bill requiring a 5-day waiting period for handgun sales; the bill is named for Pres. Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was left partially paralyzed by a bullet during an assassination attempt on Reagan.
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.”
1995 Ireland votes 50.28% to 49.72% to end its 70-year-old ban on divorce.
REFERENCES: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeoplehistory.com, timeandate.com, factmonster.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
