TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: NOVEMBER 9
1494 Piero the Unfortunate of the de’ Medici family, ruler of Florence, loses his power and flees the state
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte participates in a coup and declares himself dictator of France.
1848 The first U.S. Post Office in California opens in San Francisco at Clay and Pike streets. At the time there are only about 15,000 European settlers living in the state.
1862 US Grant issues orders to bar Jews from serving under him
1888 Jack the Ripper killed his last victim, Mary Jane Kelly.
1906 President Theodore Roosevelt leaves Washington, D.C., for a 17-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico, becoming the first president to make an official visit outside of the United States.
1918 Germany is proclaimed a republic as the kaiser abdicates and flees to the Netherlands.
1938 Nazi troops and sympathizers destroyed and looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned 267 synagogues, killed 91 Jews, and rounded up over 25,000 Jewish men in an event that became known as Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass.”
1938 Al Capp, cartoonist of Lil’ Abner creates Sadie Hawkins Day
1953 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 1922 ruling that major league baseball did not come within the scope of federal antitrust laws.
1965 Roger Allen LaPorte, a 22-year-old former seminarian and a member of the Catholic worker movement, immolates himself at the United Nations in New York City in protest of the Vietnam War.
1965 A switch at a station near Niagara Falls failed. The Northeast and parts of Canada went dark for more than 13 hours.
1983 Alfred Heineken, beer brewer from Amsterdam, is kidnapped and held for a ransom of more than $10 million.
1989 Borders between East and West Germany were opened and the Berlin Wall began to be dismantled the next day.
1993 Stari Most, a 427-year-old bridge in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is destroyed, believed to be caused by artillery fire from Bosnian Croat forces.
1994 The chemical element Darmstadtium, a radioactive synthetic element, discovered by scientists in Darmstadt, Germany.
1998 Largest civil settlement in US history: 37 brokerage houses are ordered to pay $1.3 billion to NASDAQ investors to compensate for price fixing.
2007 German Bundestag passes controversial bill mandating storage of citizens’ telecommunications traffic date for six months without probable cause.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
