It Happened On This Day November 28th

 1777 - Congress appointed John Adams to succeed Silas Deane as the commissioner to France.

1862 - Union troops under General John Blunt drove Confederates under General John Marmaduke back into the Boston Mountains in northwestern Arkansas. (Battle of Cane Hill, Arkansas) The battle was a prelude to a much larger fight at Prairie Grove, Arkansas, nine days later.

1863 - Confederate reinforcements arrived at Knoxville, Tennessee. Confederate General James Longstreet continued his siege in order to draw Union troops away from Chattanooga. Ultimately, Longstreet retreated back to Virginia.

1942 - In Boston, MA, a fire at the Coconut Grove nightclub killed 491 people.

1963 - U.S. President Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would be renamed Cape Kennedy in honor of his assassinated predecessor. The name was changed back to Cape Canaveral in 1973 by a vote of residents.

1964 - The U.S. launched the space probe Mariner IV from Cape Kennedy on a course set for Mars.

1964 - U.S. President Johnson's top advisors recommend a plan for the escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam. The campain, code-named Rolling Thunder, ran from March 1865 to October 1968.

1981 - President Reagan called coach Paul "Bear" Bryant of the Alabama University football team to congratulate him on his 315th career win.

1982 - President Reagan met with Clint Eastwood and Gordon Wilson to discuss their group's effort to get American P.O.W.s out of Laos.

1983 - President Reagan signed proclamation 5131. It proclaimed the years 1983 through 1992 as the National Decade of Disabled Persons.

1984 - President Reagan and the First Lady attended the Senate Republican Unity Dinner where Senator Dole was made the new Majority Leader.

1988 - President Reagan met with the artist that had been commissioned to paint his portrait for the National Gallery.

1995 - U.S. President Clinton signed a $6 billion road bill that ended the federal 55 mph speed limit.

2000 - In the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, the oil tanker Westchester lost power and ran aground near Port Sulphur, LA. The spill was about 567,000 gallons of crude oil.