This Day In History – November 9

1520 – More than 50 people are sentenced and executed in the Stockholm Bloodbath

1620 – Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

1764 – Mary Campbell, a captive of the Lenape during the French and Indian War, is turned over to forces commanded by Colonel Henry Bouquet.

1780 – American Revolutionary War: In the Battle of Fishdam Ford a force British and Loyalist troops fail in a surprise attack against the South Carolina Patriot militia under Brigadier General Thomas Sumter.

1851 – Kentucky marshals abduct abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and take him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape.

1872 – The Great Boston Fire of 1872.

1887 – The United States receives rights to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

1888 – Jack the Ripper kills Mary Jane Kelly, his last known victim.

1906 – Theodore Roosevelt is the first sitting President of the United States to make an official trip outside the country. He did so to inspect progress on the Panama Canal.

1917 – Joseph Stalin enters the provisional government of Bolshevik Russia.

1918 – Spiro Agnew, 39th Vice President of the United States (d. 1996), was born

1923 – In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crush the Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria. The failed coup is the work of the Nazis.

1938 – Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht.

1938 – German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria leaving at least 100 dead and over 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps . This provided the prelude to the Holocaust in Germany. Over 100,000 German Jews left Germany realizing that they would not be safe. The world powers were outraged by what the Nazis had done but the strongest they did was to break off diplomatic relations which allowed Nazis to commit the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust
1965 – Several U.S. states and parts of Canada are hit by a series of blackouts lasting up to 13 hours in the Northeast Blackout of 1965.

1970 – Vietnam War: The Supreme Court of the United States votes 6 to 3 against hearing a case to allow Massachusetts to enforce its law granting residents the right to refuse military service in an undeclared war.

1979 – Nuclear false alarm: the NORAD computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland detected purported massive Soviet nuclear strike. After reviewing the raw data from satellites and checking the early warning radars, the alert is cancelled.

1989 – Cold War: Fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany. This key event led to the eventual reunification of East and West Germany, and fall of communism in eastern Europe including Russia.

1998 – A US federal judge ordered 37 US brokerage houses to pay 1.03 billion USD to cheated NASDAQ investors to compensate for price-fixing. This is the largest civil settlement in United States history.

2002 – Leon Boya, a U.S. citizen who lives a mere 500 yards from the U.S./Canadian border, marked his territory, by way of a simple declaration. Boya explained that it was possible for people to illegally cross the U.S. border, but in order to do so they “got to get by the neighbors.”

2007 – The German Bundestag passes the controversial data retention bill mandating storage of citizens’ telecommunications traffic data for six months without probable cause.

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