What happened on 9 November?

16 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1799 Napoleon's rule of France First Consul then Emperor, from the coup of Brumaire to his first abdication in April 1814; after exile on Elba he returns for the Hundred Days in 1815 and abdicates again after Wa
2. 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall East Germany opens its border crossings after a botched Politburo announcement; thousands of East Berliners stream into the West. Symbolic end of the Iron Curtain and trigger for G
3. 1918 Weimar Republic proclaimed Philipp Scheidemann proclaims the German Republic from the Reichstag balcony.
4. 1918 Abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II Chancellor Max von Baden announces Wilhelm II's abdication on 9 November; the Kaiser crosses into the Netherlands the next day and formally abdicates on 28 November.
5. 1938 Kristallnacht Nazi-coordinated pogroms across Germany and Austria; synagogues burned, Jewish-owned shops smashed, ~30,000 sent to camps.
6. 1799 Coup of 18 Brumaire Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and became First Consul, paving the road to empire.
7. 1683 Born: George II Last British monarch to lead troops in battle, at Dettingen in 1743.
8. 1841 Born: Edward VII Long-waiting Prince of Wales who gave his name to the Edwardian era.
9. 1568 Oda Nobunaga seizes Kyoto Nobunaga defeats rival daimyo and seizes Kyoto, beginning Japan's late-16th-century unification.
10. 1922 Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics The delayed 1921 prize honours his law of the photoelectric effect — pointedly not relativity, which the committee still thought too contentious.
11. 1867 Tokugawa Yoshinobu returns power to the emperor (Taisei Hokan) The last shogun formally returns governing authority to the emperor; the shogunate's end follows with the restoration decree of January 1868 and the Boshin War.
12. 1901 Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 Four years after his First Symphony was savaged into silence and depression, Rachmaninoff — coaxed back to work by the hypnotist Dr Dahl, to whom the score is dedicated — premieres
13. 1967 Saturn V first flies Von Braun's Moon rocket, the most powerful machine yet built, flies its first all-up test as Apollo 4, shaking the press huts at Cape Kennedy.
14. 1962 Soviet missiles are shipped out of Cuba The last of the forty-two Soviet missiles leaves Cuba aboard eight freighters, deck cargo uncovered so US aircraft and warships can count them at sea — inspection by fly-past, sinc
15. 1993 Destruction of the Stari Most Croat shelling drops Mostar's 427-year-old Ottoman bridge into the Neretva — the war's starkest image of heritage as target. Rebuilt stone by stone by 2004.
16. 1953 Death of Dylan Thomas On his fourth American reading tour, drinking hard and ill, the 39-year-old poet collapses at the Chelsea Hotel and dies days later in a New York hospital.