On this day in 2004, for the first time in Afghanistan's history, voters went to the polls to choose a president, selecting Hamid Karzai, who had served as the interim president after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
| 2001: | | The United Service Organizations (USO) appointed entertainer Wayne Newton as its official celebrity front man, replacing Bob Hope, who had served in that capacity since the early 1950s. |
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| 1997: | | Italian playwright Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
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| 1990: | | David H. Souter was sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice. |
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| 1982: | | Anna Freud, psychoanalyst, author, and daughter of Sigmund Freud, died in London. |
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| 1888: | | Built between 1848 and 1884 and dedicated in 1885, the Washington Monument—a marble-faced granite obelisk that honours the first U.S. president, George Washington—opened to the public in Washington, D.C. |
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| 1635: | | Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony, and, as a result, he later founded the colony of Rhode Island. |
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| 1514: | | Mary Tudor, sister of King Henry VIII of England, became the third wife of King Louis XII of France. |
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