Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 9

This is a list of selected December 9 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← December 8	December 10 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Marguerite Durand
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  Electron microscope picture of smallpox
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  Child with smallpox, 1973
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  Arenberg Castle, on the campus of the Catholic University of Leuven
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  General Antonio José de Sucre
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  Cruiser Mk I tank
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  The surrender of Jerusalem

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
; Army Day in Peru (1824)	refimprove
Independence Day in Tanzania (1961)	refimprove section
1425 – Pope Martin V issued a papal bull establishing what later became the Catholic University of Leuven, the largest, oldest and most prominent university in Belgium.	needs rewrite, unreferenced section
1824 – Forces led by General Antonio José de Sucre defeated a Royalist army in the Battle of Ayacucho, ending the Peruvian War of Independence.	refimprove section, unreferenced section
1856 – Anglo-Persian War: Bushehr, a city on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf in present-day Iran, surrendered to occupying British forces.	refimprove
1872 – P. B. S. Pinchback took office as governor of Louisiana, the first African-American governor of a U.S. state.	refimprove section
1931 – The approval of the Spanish Constitution by the Constituent Cortes paved the way to the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic.	unreferenced section
1946 – The Doctors' trial, the first of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, began to prosecute doctors who were allegedly involved in Nazi human experimentation during World War II.	needs more footnotes
1958 – The John Birch Society, named after John Birch, an American missionary who was killed in China by communists, was founded to fight the perceived threat of communism in the United States.	refimprove section
1960 – Coronation Street, the longest-running television soap opera in the United Kingdom, was first broadcast on ITV.	plot summary too long
1965 – A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first television adaptation of Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts, was broadcast for the first time.	refimprove section
1990 – Lech Wałęsa became the first person elected President of Poland in a direct presidential election after the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.	appears on August 14
1996 – Gwen Jacob was acquitted of indecent exposure for having taken off her shirt on a hot day, thus guaranteeing topfreedom in Ontario, Canada.	lots of CN tags (7)
Íñigo López de Mendoza |b|1493|	Too much unreferenced
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon |d|1674|	unreferenced section
Joan Armatrading |b|1950|	Too much uncited

Eligible

• 1775 – American Revolutionary War: After their loss in the Battle of Great Bridge, British authorities were forced to evacuate from the Colony of Virginia.
• 1822 – In a memoir read to the French Academy of Sciences, Augustin-Jean Fresnel coined the terms linear, circular, and elliptical polarization, and reported a direct refraction experiment verifying his theory that optical rotation is a form of birefringence.
• 1888 – The first edition of the Argosy magazine was published under the title The Golden Argosy.
• 1892 – The English association football club Newcastle United was founded by the merger of Newcastle East End and West End.
• 1905 – Legislation establishing state secularism in France was passed by the Chamber of Deputies.
• 1911 – A mine explosion near Briceville, Tennessee, killed 84 miners despite a well-organized rescue effort led by the United States Bureau of Mines.
• 1917 – First World War: Hussein al-Husayni, the Ottoman mayor of Jerusalem, surrendered the city to British forces (pictured).
• 1940 – Second World War: British and Commonwealth forces began Operation Compass, the first major Allied military operation of the Western Desert campaign.
• 1961 – Tanganyika Territory gained independence from Britain before becoming part of Tanzania three years later.
• 1965 – A large, brilliant fireball was seen by thousands in midwestern North America before crash landing in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
• 1969 – U.S. secretary of state William P. Rogers proposed a plan, later called the Rogers Plan, for a ceasefire in the War of Attrition; Egypt's and Jordan's acceptance of the plan over Palestine Liberation Organization objections led to civil war in Jordan in September 1970.
• 1979 – A World Health Organization commission of scientists certified the global eradication of smallpox, making it the only human infectious disease to date to have been completely eradicated.
• 1981 – Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner; his subsequent conviction and death sentence generated controversy in the United States.
• 2016 – Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, was impeached, marking the culmination of the country's political scandal.
• 2017 – Same-sex marriage in Australia became legal as the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 came into effect.
• Born/died this day: | Nasr ibn Sayyar |d|748| Gertrude of Brunswick |b|1117| Golding Bird |b|1814| Joe Kelley |b|1871| Lilias Armstrong |d|1937| Giacomo dalla Torre |b|1944| Denise Phua |b|1959 | Feroz Khan Noon |d|1970

December 9: International Anti-Corruption Day

The first computer mouse

• 1688 – In the only substantial military action in England during the Glorious Revolution, forces loyal to William of Orange were decisively victorious in the Battle of Reading.
• 1897 – French actress, journalist and leading suffragette Marguerite Durand founded the feminist newspaper La Fronde.
• 1948 – The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide in legal terms and advises its signatories to prevent and punish such actions.
• 1968 – Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as "The Mother of All Demos", publicly debuting the computer mouse (pictured), hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS).
• 2008 – Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich was arrested for a number of corruption crimes, including attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat that was being vacated by then-President-elect Barack Obama.

• Joseph Desha (b. 1768)
• Fritz Haber (b. 1868)
• Alister Murdoch (b. 1912)
• Eliane Morissens (d. 2006)

More anniversaries:

• December 8
• December 9
• December 10