Nov. 9
Today in history
Today is Nov. 9. On this date in:
1731: Benjamin Banneker, a mostly self-taught mathematician and astronomer, was born in Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland. Banneker was one of the first Black men to gain notoriety in science.
1799: Napoleon Bonaparte began a bloodless coup that elevated him to First Consul of France.
1888: The remains of Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and last known victim of Jack the Ripper’s killing spree, were found in London.
1906: The first sitting U.S. president to travel outside the country on an official trip, President Theodore Roosevelt departed for Panama to inspect the progress of the construction of the Panama Canal. He also made a visit to U.S. territory Puerto Rico on the trip.
1922: Dorothy Dandridge was
born in Cleveland. She was the first Black woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in the 1954 film “Carmen Jones.”
1922: Albert Einstein was named the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The award had been delayed because none of the nominees under consideration in 1921 was found to have met the criteria.
1923: Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, was born in Albany, Georgia. Coachman won gold in the high jump at the 1948 Games in London.
1934: Carl Sagan was born in New York. The astronomer and host of the TV show “Cosmos” also was a pioneer in the scientific search for life beyond Earth.
1938: Orchestrated by the Nazis, a bout of violence against Jewish people spread across Germany. Homes, businesses and synagogues were destroyed. Estimates of those killed vary, with some saying 91 were murdered and some saying the figure reached into the hundreds. Known as Kristallnacht, it is considered a prelude to the Holocaust.
1965: The tripping of an electrical safety relay in Ontario, Canada, began a cascading effect that knocked out power to 30 million people in parts of the Northeast and Canada. Power was restored by the next day.
1967: The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published, featuring an article about the Monterey Pop Festival and a photo of John Lennon in the movie “How I Won the War.”
1967: Apollo 4 was a success. It was the first uncrewed test flight of the Saturn V rocket that eventually launched astronauts on their way toward the moon.
1970: The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case, Massachusetts v. Laird, challenging the constitutionality of America’s military involvement in Vietnam because Congress had not declared war. Massachusetts had passed a state law exempting its citizens from serving in such an undeclared war, and the state then sought to bring the question of the conflict’s constitutionality before the justices.
1985: At 22 years old, Garry Kasparov became the youngest male world chess champion at this point in time by defeating Anatoly Karpov in their 24th and final game of the series for a 13-11 victory.
1989: East Germans were given the right to freely travel to West Germany and elsewhere, affording East Berliners the right to travel past the Berlin Wall into West Berlin. Before the night was out, Germans began chipping away at the barrier, carrying off chunks of one of the symbols of the diminishing Iron Curtain.
2023: Surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York announced they had performed the world’s first whole-eye transplant nearly six months earlier for 46-year-old veteran and electrical line worker Aaron James after a work-related injury.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, November 9
