Today in History....November 9

* 1799 - Napoleon Bonaparte leads the Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire ending the Directory government, and becoming one of its three Consuls (Consulate Government)

* 1872, fire destroyed nearly 800 buildings in Boston

* 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 becomes the first sitting President of the United States to make an official trip outside the country (to inspect progress on the Panama Canal)

* 1917, Stalin enters the provisional government of USSR

* 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicates after the German Revolution, and Germany is proclaimed a Republic

* 1921, Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect

* 1937, Japanese troops take control of Shanghai, China.

* 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in what became known as "Kristallnacht."

* 1963, twin disasters struck Japan as some 450 miners were killed in a coal-dust explosion, and about 160 people died in a train crash

* 1965, several U.S. Northeast states and parts of Canada are hit by a series of blackouts lasting up to 13 hours. ALSO: 1965 - Catholic Worker member Roger Allen LaPorte, protesting against the Vietnam War, sets himself on fire in front of the United Nations
* 1985, Garry Kasparov becomes the youngest world chess champion by beating Anatoly Karpov

* 1989, Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to freely travel to West Germany.
People start demolishing the Berlin Wall

* 1998, brokerage houses are ordered to pay $1.03 billion to cheated NASDAQ investors to compensate for their price-fixing. This is the largest civil settlement in United States history

* 2003, during the holiest season f the year, practitioners of that "religion of peace" wage attack a suicide bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 17 people

* 2005, others do it again, this time at three hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing at least 56 people

* 2006, Republican Sen. George Allen conceded defeat in the Virginia Senate race to Democrat Jim Webb, sealing the Dems' control of Congress