TODAY IN HISTORY
1620: The passengers and crew of the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod.
1872: Fire destroyed nearly 800 buildings in Boston.
1918: It was announced that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II would abdicate; he then fled to the Netherlands.
1935: United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations).
1938: Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom of deliberate persecution that became known as “Kristallnacht.”
1953: Welsh author-poet Dylan Thomas died in New York at age 39.
1965: The great Northeast blackout began as a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours, leaving 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity.
1970: Former French President Charles de Gaulle died at age 79.
1976: The U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.”
1989: Communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West; joyous Germans danced atop the Berlin Wall.
2000: George W. Bush’s lead over Al Gore in allor-nothing Florida slipped beneath 300 votes in a suspense-filled recount, as Democrats threw the presidential election to the courts, claiming “an injustice unparalleled in our history.”
2005: Three suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 60 victims and wounding hundreds.
2007: President Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a day, and rounded up thousands of her supporters to block a mass rally against his emergency rule.
2011: After 46 seasons as Penn State’s head football coach and a record 409 victories, Joe Paterno was fired along with the university president, Graham Spanier, over their handling of child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Taylor Swift won her second entertainer of the year award at The Country Music Association Awards.
2016: Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded the presidential election to Republican Donald Trump, telling supporters in New York that her defeat was “painful, and it will be for a long time.” But Clinton told her faithful to accept Trump and the election results, urging them to give him “an open mind and a chance to lead.”
2020: President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, injecting more uncertainty to a rocky transition period as Joe Biden prepared to assume the presidency; Trump said Christopher Miller, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, would serve as acting secretary. Attorney General William Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the presidential election was certified, despite no evidence of widespread fraud; the action raised the prospect that Trump would use the Justice Department to try to challenge the outcome. The Trump administration blocked government officials from cooperating with President-elect Joe Biden’s team on a transition. Georgia’s two Republican senators called for the resignation of the state’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, who had said there weren’t enough doubtful votes to tip Georgia into the Trump column.