TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Thursday, Nov. 24, the 328th day of 2022. There are 37 days left in the year. Today is Thanksgiving. On this date in:

1859: British naturalist Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” which explained his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

1865: Mississippi became the first Southern state to enact laws which came to be known as “Black Codes” aimed at limiting the rights of newly freed Blacks; other states of the former Confederacy soon followed.

1963: Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in a scene captured on live television.

1971: A hijacker calling himself “Dan Cooper” (but who became popularly known as “D.B. Cooper”) parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 over the Pacific Northwest after receiving $200,000 in ransom; his fate remains unknown.

1987: The United States and the Soviet Union agreed on terms to scrap shorterand medium-range missiles. (The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev the following month.)

2000: The U.S. Supreme Court stepped into the bitter, overtime struggle for the White House, agreeing to consider George W. Bush’s appeal against the hand recounting of ballots in Florida.

2014: It was announced that a grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri, had decided against indicting Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown; the decision enraged protesters who set fire to buildings and cars and looted businesses in the area where Brown had been fatally shot.