Browse Historical Events by Day: What Happened on December 9th?

The Treaty of Paris is signed, ending a conflict between King Louis IX of France and King Henry III of England.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of the most important religious icons in Mexico, is believed to have appeared to Juan Diego.

Jerusalem surrenders to British troops. The mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, delivers the Ottoman Governor's letter surrendering the city to Brigadier General C.F. Watson, of the 180th Brigade. Two days later General Edmund Allenby, commander of the British “Egyptian Expeditionary Force,” understanding the symbolic sensitivity of Jerusalem to both its residents and religious adherents the world over, entered Jerusalem, on foot. More

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (.UNICEF) is established. More

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is established. More

The John Birch Society (JBS) is founded by Robert W. Welch Jr. More

Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) gains independence from British colonial rule.

Douglas Engelbart, gives a landmark computer demonstration at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco". The presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. The name "The Mother of All Demos" was retroactively applied to the landmark computer demonstration. More

The World Health Assembly declares smallpox, a serious infectious disease, eradicated (eliminated). No cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since. More

The Intifada begins in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip twenty years after Israeli conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and permanently annexed East Jerusalem. Israeli settlers had moved into the occupied territories, seizing Arab land. By December 1987, 2,200 armed Jewish settlers occupied 40 percent of the Gaza Strip, while 650,000 impoverished Palestinians were crowded into the other 60 percent, making the Palestinian portion of the tiny Gaza Strip one of the most densely populated areas on earth. More