On November 24:
380 – Theodosius I made his adventus, or formal entry, into Constantinople.
1429 – Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieged La Charité.
1542 – Battle of Solway Moss: The English army defeated the Scots.
1639 – Jeremiah Horrocks observed the transit of Venus, an event he had predicted.
1642 – Abel Tasman became the first European to discover the island Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania).
1850 – Danish troops defeated a Schleswig-Holstein force in the Battle of Lottorf.
1859 – Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Lookout Mountain – Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant captured Lookout Mountain and began to break the Confederate siege of the city led by General Braxton Bragg.
1864 – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French painter, was born (d. 1901).
1922 – Author and Irish Republican Army member Robert Erskine Childers was executed by an Irish Free State firing squad for illegally carrying a revolver.
1940 – World War II: Slovakia became a signatory to the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis Powers.
1941 – World War II: The United States granted Lend-Lease to the Free French.
1943 – World War II: The USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed near Tarawa and sank with nearly 650 men killed.
1944 – World War II: The first bombing raid against Tokyo from the east and by land was carried out by 88 American aircraft.
1959 – All hands were lost when the modern coastal freighter Holmglen foundered off the South Canterbury coast. The cause of the tragedy was never established.
1961 Arundhati Roy, Indian writer, was born.
1962 – The West Berlin branch of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany formed a separate party, the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin.
1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. The shooting was broadcast live on television.
1965 – Joseph Désiré Mobutu seized power in the Congo and becomes President.
1966 – A Bulgarian plane with 82 people on board crashed near Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.
1966 – New York City experienced the smoggiest day in the city’s history.
1969 – The Apollo 12 command module splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to the Moon.
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.
1973 – A national speed limit was imposed on the Autobahn in Germany due to the 1973 oil crisis.
1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discovered 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.
1992 – A China Southern Airlines domestic flight crashed, killing all 141 people on-board.
1993 – In Liverpool, 11-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were convicted of the murder of 2-year-old James Bulger.
2007 – Australians elected the Labor Party
at a federal election; outgoing prime minister, John Howard, became the first since 1929 to lose his own seat.
Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia