MILESFORTIS

November 26

1476 – Vlad III Țepeș, known as ‘The Impaler’, defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Báthory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.

1778 – Captain James Cook becomes the first European to visit Maui in the Hawaiian islands.

1789 – A national Thanksgiving Day is observed in the United States as proclaimed by President Washington at the request of Congress.

1863 – President Lincoln proclaims November 26 as a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated annually on the final Thursday of November. Since 1941, it has been on the 4th Thursday.

1917 – The Manchester Guardian publishes the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France with Italian and Russian agreement on their plans on how to partition the Ottoman empire as it collapsed during World War I.

1922 – Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun

1926 – John Moses Browning dies, age 71, of heart failure while at his work bench in his son’s design shop at Fabrique Nationale in Herstal, Belgium.

1941 – On the same day that Japan’s 1st Air Fleet, under the command of Admiral Chūichi Nagumo departs Hitokappu Bay, enroute to Hawaii, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivers a note to the Japanese envoy Saburō Kurusu in Washington D.C., demanding that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina, in return for which the U.S. would lift economic sanctions.

1942 – Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, premieres in New York City.

1943 – While flight leader, launched off the USS Enterprise on the first night fighter mission to engage Japanese bombers attacking the carrier task force, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Edward O’Hare, earlier recipient of the Medal of Honor, is shot down in action and lost at sea.

1950 – During the Korean War, troops from the People’s Republic of China launch a massive counterattack in North Korea against South Korean and United Nations forces along the Ch’ongch’on River and around the Chosin Reservoir

1968 – U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot 1st Lieutenant James P. Fleming rescues an Army Special Forces CCC MACV-SOG unit pinned down by Viet Cong fire near near Đức Cơ and is awarded the Medal of Honor in May 1970 for his actions in combat.

1990 – During a night flying weapons test, at Fort Campbell Kentucky, U.S Army Lieutenant Colonel Richard Vincent and Chief Warrant 3 Richard Walsh, assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company USASOC, are killed when their OH-6 helicopter crashes .

2000 – George W. Bush is certified the winner of Florida’s electoral votes of the 2000 Presidential election by Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.

2003 – The Concorde airliner makes its final flight over Bristol, England.

2011  The Mars Science Laboratory launches to Mars with the Curiosity Rover aboard.

2021 – The World Health Organization identifies the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant.

November 25

1177 – Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and Raynald of Châtillon defeat Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard.

1491 – The siege of Granada, the last moor stronghold in Spain, ends with Boabdil, the sultan of Granada, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Castile, León, Aragon and Sicily, signing a treaty of an immediate truce and a surrender of Granada, taking effect on January 2nd, 1492, completing the nearly 800 year long Reconquista and freeing up resources for other activity, perchance exploration of a shorter route to China.

1758 – During the French and Indian War, British forces capture Fort Duquesne located at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, from French control. Later, Fort Pitt will be built nearby and grow into modern Pittsburgh.

1783 – The last British troops leave New York City 3 months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the American War of Independence

1863 –At Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant break the siege of Chattanooga by Confederate troops under General Braxton Bragg.

1876 –  In retaliation for the U.S. Cavalry’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, U.S troops attack  and overwhelm the village of Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife at the headwaters of the Powder River in Wyoming.

1915 – Albert Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

1926 – A outbreak of tornados across the Southern states in the U.S. results in the deadliest storm total in November at the time, killing 76 people and injuring more than 400.

1950 – The Great Appalachian Blizzard of 1950 strikes across 22 states, killing 353 people and injuring more than 160.

1963 – In a state funeral, President John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

1986 –  U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese announces that profits from covert weapons sales to Iran were illegally diverted to the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

1999 – Cuban born, 6 year old, Elian Gonzalez is rescued by fishermen while floating in an inner tube off the Florida coast.

2016 – Fidel Castro dies, age 90.

 

November 24

1221 – The forces of Genghis Khan defeats those of Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu, Shah of the Khwarazm Empire at the Battle of the Indus, completing the Mongol conquest of Central Asia.

1642 – Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovers an island he calls Van Diemen’s Land n honor of the Governor of the Dutch East Indies, which is later renamed Tasmania.

1832 – The South Carolina legislature passes the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring that the Federal import tax Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 that helped New England states but less Southern states, null and void in the state, beginning a political crisis between the state and the federal government that would not be resolved until March of the next year.

1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorizes the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers

1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

1877 – Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty is published.

1917 – In Milwaukee, 9 members of the Milwaukee Police Department are killed when a bomb – suspected to have been planted by the Galleanist  faction of anarchists – is found at a church and explodes after being taken to the police office, the most deaths in a single event in U.S. police history until the September 11 attacks in 2001.

1943 – Off Tarawa Atoll, the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay is torpedoed by the IJN submarine I-175 and sinks, killing 650 service men, among them PO3 Doris ‘Dorie’ Miller, who was awarded the Navy Cross for actions during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor and which Ford Class carrier CVN-81 will be named after.

1944 – The 73rd Bombardment Wing launches the first B-29 bombing attack on Tokyo from the Northern Mariana Islands.

1963 – On live TV, Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is murdered by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters.

1969 – The Apollo 12 command module splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to land on the Moon.

1971 – During an airline hijacking, a man calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money.

1989 – After a week of mass protests against the Communist regime known as the Velvet Revolution, Miloš Jakeš and the entire Politburo of the Czechoslovak Communist Party resign from office, bringing an end to Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

2016 – The government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army  – FARC – sign a revised peace deal, ending the country’s more than 50 year long civil war.