November 24 in History

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 346 to 17 on November 24, 1947, to cite ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors for contempt of Congress after they refused to answer questions about alleged Communist affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Hollywood Ten, including Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., and Edward Dmytryk, were convicted, fined, and sentenced to prison terms of six months to one year. The major studios immediately blacklisted them. The blacklist expanded to include hundreds of writers, actors, and directors over the next decade. Many worked under pseudonyms. Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Roman Holiday under a front, and the Oscar went to his alias. The blacklist gradually collapsed in the early 1960s when Kirk Douglas credited Trumbo by name for Spartacus.

Jack Ruby stepped from a crowd of reporters in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters on November 24, 1963, and shot Lee Harvey Oswald once in the abdomen with a .38 revolver as Oswald was being transferred to the county jail. It was broadcast live on NBC television to an estimated 20 million viewers, the first time a murder was committed on live national television. Oswald died at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier. Ruby, a nightclub owner with connections to organized crime and local police, claimed he shot Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a trial. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned. Ruby died of cancer on January 3, 1967, before a new trial could be held.

A man using the name Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle on November 24, 1971, showed a flight attendant a bomb in his briefcase, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. The plane landed in Seattle, where the ransom was delivered and 36 passengers were released. Cooper then ordered the plane to fly to Mexico City at low altitude with the rear stairs down. Somewhere over the forests of southwestern Washington, he jumped into a rainstorm at 10,000 feet wearing a business suit and loafers. He was never seen again. The FBI investigated for 45 years, examining over 1,000 suspects without identifying Cooper. In 1980, an eight-year-old boy found $5,800 in deteriorated $20 bills along the Columbia River. The serial numbers matched the ransom. No other trace of Cooper or the remaining money has ever been found.

Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in the basement of Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with Mafia connections, during a live television broadcast on November 24, 1963. Millions watched it happen. Ruby said he acted spontaneously to spare Jacqueline Kennedy a public trial. Oswald had denied shooting the president. He died without a trial. Everything that happened after — every conspiracy theory, every investigation, every doubt — flows from two days in Dallas.

Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, moved to England as a teenager, and became the most theatrical rock vocalist of his generation. Bohemian Rhapsody took three weeks to record, used 180 overdubs, and was nearly not released as a single because it was six minutes long with no chorus. Radio DJs played it anyway. It went to number one. He died in November 1991 at 45, one day after publicly acknowledging he had AIDS.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on November 24, 1859, after 20 years of accumulating evidence. The entire first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day. Darwin had delayed publication for years, partly from caution and partly from awareness of the controversy it would cause. Alfred Russel Wallace forced his hand by independently developing a nearly identical theory of natural selection. The book presented evolution through natural selection in careful, accessible prose, supported by evidence from geology, comparative anatomy, embryology, and biogeography. Darwin deliberately avoided discussing human evolution. The public debate that followed, including the famous 1860 exchange between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, transformed not just biology but humanity's understanding of its place in nature. Within two decades, the scientific community accepted evolution as fact.