November 9

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

1780 – In the Battle of Fishdam Ford during the Revolutionary War, a force of British and Loyalist troops fail in a surprise attack against the South Carolina Patriot militia under Brigadier General Thomas Sumter, who later has a fort named after him.

1862 – Union General Ambrose Burnside assumes command of the Army of the Potomac, after General George B. McClellan is removed.

1867 – The last Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, hands power back to the Emperor of Japan, starting the Meiji Restoration.

1872 – A fire erupts in the basement of a commercial warehouse at 83–87 Summer Street, Boston and is not controlled until 12 hours later, after destroying 776 buildings and much of the financial district in the city’s downtown, causing over $73 million in damage and killing 30 people died, including 12 firefighters.

1887 – Having earlier acquired rights to the exclusive use of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. Navy officially takes possession of the area.

1913 – A massive blizzard, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the lakes, reaches its greatest intensity after beginning two days earlier, destroying 19 ships and killing more than 250 people.

1917 – The Balfour Declaration,  a letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter, Baron Rothschild, declaring the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in what would become British Mandate Palestine, is publicly published.

1918 – Due to massive civil unrest and mutinies in the imperial navy and army, German Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates the throne.

1935 – The Committee for Industrial Organization, the precursor to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, is founded in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by eight trade unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor. AFL-CIO

1938 – Using the assassination of their diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris as an excuse, the Nazis instigate what is called Kristallnacht for the breaking of the glass windows in many Jewish owned businesses and synagogues in Germany.

1960 – Robert McNamara is named president of Ford Motor Company, the first non-Ford to serve in that post, but resigns a month later to join the administration of newly elected John Kennedy.

1967 – NASA launches the unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft, atop the first Saturn V rocket, from Cape Kennedy.

1970 – In the case of Massachusetts v. Laird, the Supreme Court, citing a lack of jurisdiction, refuses to hear the case. Massachusetts’ Attorney General seeking the Court to rule on the passage of a state law granting residents the right to refuse military service in an undeclared war.

1979 –  North American Aerospace Defense Command computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland, detect a purported massive Soviet nuclear missile strike against the U.S. After reviewing the raw data from satellites and checking the early warning radars, the alert is cancelled as a false alarm caused by a NORAD technician loading a test tape, but failing to switch the system status to “test”.

1989 – East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to freely travel to West Berlin.

1998 – A U.S. federal judge, in the largest civil settlement in American history, orders 37 U.S. brokerage houses to pay $1.03 billion to cheated NASDAQ investors to compensate for price fixing.

2004 – The Firefox 1.0 internet browser is released.