NOW & THEN
NOVEMBER 9
1541: Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was jailed. She was executed at the Tower of London three months later.
1620: The Pilgrims on the Mayflower, having crossed the Atlantic, spotted land at Cape Cod.
1729: Britain, France and Spain signed the Treaty of Seville, ending the Anglo-spanish War.
1769: The first Co-operative Society in Britain was founded by weavers of Fenwick in Ayrshire.
1794: Russian troops occupied Warsaw.
1799: Napoleon Bonaparte became the First Consul of France.
1847: Doctor James Young Simpson delivered Wilhemina Carstairs in Edinburgh, the first child to be born with the aid of anaesthesia.
1859: Flogging was banned in the British Army.
1872: The Great Boston Fire began. It destroyed 776 buildings, causing losses of $73 million.
1888: Jack the Ripper ’s fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was found dead in her room in London.
1907: The Cullinan Diamond, which had been discovered in South Africa in 1905, was presented to King Edward VII on his birthday.
1918: Kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland.
1922: Nazi SS was officially founded in Germany.
1937: Japanese troops took Shanghai.
1938: Kristallnacht in Germany, when Nazis burned 267 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish homes and businesses.
1944: The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Red Cross.
1950: Ice blocks the size of dinner plates fell out of the Devon sky – a shower of frozen meteors weighing up to 15oz each. One of them beheaded a sheep.
1955: The United Nations expressed disapproval of South Africa’s apartheid politics.
1956: The rising in Hungary was crushed.
1960: John F Kennedy, at 43, was elected the youngest ever United States president.
1962: United States completed emergency airlift of arms and ammunition to India in that nation’s border war with China.
1963: Coal mine explosion at Umuta, Japan, killed 452 miners and injured 450.
The biggest power cut in US history blacked out sections of New York and nine other states. There was a significant rise in births nine months later.
1965: Act banning capital punishment in UK came into effect.
1979: A computer fault led to a full-scale nuclear alert in the US.
1989: The East German government announced the opening of the Iron Curtain border, including the Berlin Wall. Crowds stormed Checkpoint Charlie.
1990: Mary Robinson, a 46-year-old lawyer, became the first woman president of the Republic of Ireland.
2010: The anti-tobacco group ASH Scotland released a report which revealed smoking cost the country £1.1 billion a year.
2014: USA led air strikes on the Iraqi city of Mosul, against Islamic State.