1991: Edith Cresson appointed French premier.
On this day in 1991, Edith Cresson of the Socialist Party became the first female premier of France, but she lost the office less than a year later because of rising unemployment and declining support from within her party.
| 1918: | | The first regular airmail route in the United States opened between New York City and Washington, D.C. |
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| 1914: | | | Mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who, with Sir Edmund Hillary, was the first person to stand atop the summit of Mount Everest, was born in Tshechu, Tibet. |
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| 1886: | | American poet Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
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| 1885: | | | Louis Riel surrendered after leading two rebellions against the Canadian government in response to its efforts to assume the territorial rights of the Hudson's Bay Company in northwestern Canada. |
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| 1859: | | | Physical chemist Pierre Curie, cowinner (with his wife, Marie Curie) of the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, was born in Paris. |
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| 495: | | | On the Aventine Hill in Rome, the temple of the Roman god Mercury was dedicated. |
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