Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 9

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 * 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


 * 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.