Events on November 23 52
Year 1499
Pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck is hanged for reportedly attempting to escape from the Tower of London. He had invaded England in 1497, claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV of England.
Year 1510
First campaign of the Ottoman Empire against the Kingdom of Imereti (modern western Georgia). Ottoman armies sack the capital Kutaisi and burn Gelati Monastery.
Year 1531
The Second War of Kappel results in the dissolution of the Protestant alliance in Switzerland.
Year 1733
The start of the 1733 slave insurrection on St. John in what was then the Danish West Indies.
Year 1863
American Civil War: Battle of Chattanooga begins: Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant reinforce troops at Chattanooga, Tennessee, and counter-attack Confederate troops.
Year 1867
The Manchester Martyrs are hanged in Manchester, England, for killing a police officer while freeing two Irish nationalists from custody.
Year 1876
Corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Magear Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.
Year 1889
The first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.
Year 1890
King William III of the Netherlands dies without a male heir and a special law is passed to allow his daughter Princess Wilhelmina to succeed him.
Year 1914
Mexican Revolution: The last of U.S. forces withdraw from Veracruz, occupied seven months earlier in response to the Tampico Affair.
Year 1918
Heber J. Grant succeeds Joseph F. Smith as the seventh president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Year 1924
Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.
Year 1934
An Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission in the Ogaden discovers an Italian garrison at Walwal, well within Ethiopian territory. This leads to the Abyssinia Crisis.
Year 1939
World War II: HMS Rawalpindi is sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
Year 1940
World War II: Romania becomes a signatory of the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis powers.
Year 1943
World War II: The Deutsche Opernhaus on Bismarckstraße in the Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg is destroyed. It will eventually be rebuilt in 1961 and be called the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Year 1953
Pilot Felix Moncla and Lieutenant Robert Wilson disappear while in pursuit of a mysterious craft over Lake Superior.
Year 1955
The Cocos Islands are transferred from the control of the United Kingdom to that of Australia.
Year 1959
French President Charles de Gaulle declares in a speech in Strasbourg his vision for "Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals".
Year 1963
The BBC broadcasts the first episode of An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.
Year 1971
Representatives of the People's Republic of China attend the United Nations, including the United Nations Security Council, for the first time.
Year 1972
The Soviet Union makes its final attempt at successfully launching the N1 rocket.
Year 1974
Sixty Ethiopian politicians, aristocrats, military officers, and other persons are executed by the provisional military government.
Year 1976
Apneist Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m undersea without breathing equipment.
Year 1978
The Geneva Frequency Plan of 1975 goes into effect, realigning many of Europe's longwave and mediumwave broadcasting frequencies.
Year 1980
The 6.9 Mw Irpinia earthquake shakes southern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 2,483-4,900, and injuring 7,700-8,934.
Year 1981
Iran-Contra affair: Ronald Reagan signs the top secret National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), giving the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Year 1985
Gunmen hijack EgyptAir Flight 648 en route from Athens to Cairo. When the plane lands in Malta, Egyptian commandos storm the aircraft, but 60 people die in the raid.
Year 1992
The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Year 1993
Rachel Whiteread wins both the £20,000 Turner Prize award for best British modern artist and the £40,000 K Foundation art award for the worst artist of the year.
Year 1996
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 is hijacked, then crashes into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros after running out of fuel, killing 125.
Year 2003
Rose Revolution: Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze resigns following weeks of mass protests over flawed elections.
Year 2004
The Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi, the largest religious building in Georgia, is consecrated.
Year 2005
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia and becomes the first woman to lead an African country.
Year 2006
A series of bombings kills at least 215 people and injures 257 others in Sadr City, making it the second deadliest sectarian attack since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003.
Year 2007
MS Explorer, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sinks in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. There are no fatalities.
Year 2010
Bombardment of Yeonpyeong: North Korean artillery attack kills two civilians and two marines on Yeonpyeong Island, South Korea.
Year 2011
Arab Spring: After 11 months of protests in Yemen, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh signs a deal to transfer power to the vice president, in exchange for legal immunity.
Year 2015
Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.