Today in History: November 9: In 1989, Communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West for the first time in decades. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt made the first trip abroad of any sitting president in order to observe construction of the Panama Canal. In 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as thousands of Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom or deliberate persecution, that became known as “Kristallnacht.” In 1976, the U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.” In 2007, President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a day and rounded up thousands of her supporters to block a mass rally against his emergency rule.