This article is a part of The Gazelle’s new series, Faculty's Choice. Every week, we will ask various faculty divisions about the most influential or significant works in their field. For the second week, we asked NYU Abu Dhabi’s History department for a date that changed the world. Below are various professors’ individual lists of answers as well as The Gazelle’s choice.

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During World War II, the Soviet state sought to mobilize all its available resources for the war effort, including religion. In the 1940s, it opened up four official Soviet Muftiates: in Ufa, for Europe and Siberia; Tashkent, for Central Asia; and Makhachkala and Baku, for the North and South Caucasus, respectively. These Muftiates revived the structure of a so-called church for Islam that had been established in Russia in the 18th-century to monitor domestic religious activity. As the Cold War competition for the Third World heated up, these institutions became increasingly important as tools of Soviet public diplomacy, staying in touch with Muslims abroad to promote official narratives about Soviet tolerance of Islam.

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The Berlin Conference in which European nations mapped Africa for exploration and exploitation, leading to the European colonization of the continent.

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The 228 incident. An anti-government uprising in Taiwan which led to the Taiwanese independence movement.

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— November 9: This date has been dubbed, increasingly since 1989, as the Schicksalstag or fateful date of modern German history, punctuating a history of violence of sorts:

— 9 November 1848: The execution in Vienna by firing squad of the Commissioner of the Frankfurt National Assembly Robert Blum, along with eight other revolutionary leaders that heralded the end of the democracy-seeking March Revolution, more widely known as the Spring of Nations, in the German states by early 1849.

— 9 November 1918: The Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann declares the inauguration of the Weimar Republic and the end of the Second German Reich. On the same day, Karl Liebknecht, leader of the Spartacist League, the future German Communist Party, declares a Free Socialist State. This lasts for two months until Liebknecht and his comrade Rosa Luxemburg are murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps extreme right-wing militia during the suppression of the German Revolution in 1918–1919.

— 9 November 1923: Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch fails in Munich, an episode on which the Nazi Party based much of its mythology of resistance in the 1930s.

— 9 November 1938: Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass, the widespread anti-Semitic pogroms against Jewish people, synagogues, and property across Nazi Germany and the recently-annexed Austria. This resulted in around 400 dead and was followed by the arrest and deportation of around 30,000 German-Jewish citizens to concentration camps, hundreds of whom were murdered.

— 9 November 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall that paved the way for German reunification in October 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

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The Treaty of Tordesillas divided Spain and Portugal’s colonial spheres of influence along a meridian equidistant from the Cape Verde Islands, controlled by Portugal, and the Spanish controlled islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. The treaty provided for European colonialism in the Americas as well as establishing a precedent for colonialism elsewhere in the world.