On this day in history
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Source: HistoryNet.com
1776: Abigail Adams writes to husband John that women are "determined to foment a rebellion" if the new Declaration of Independence fails to guarantee their rights.
1790: In Paris, France, Maximilien Robespierre is elected president of the Jacobin Club.
1836: The first monthly installment of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens is published in London.
1880: The first electric street lights ever installed by a municipality are turned on in Wabash, Indiana.
1889: The Eiffel Tower in Paris officially opens on the Left Bank as part of the Exhibition of 1889.
1917: The United States purchases the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.
1918: Daylight Savings Time goes into effect throughout the United States for the first time.
1921: Great Britain declares a state of emergency because of the thousands of coal miners on strike.
1939: Britain and France agree to support Poland if Germany threatens to invade.
1940: La Guardia airport in New York officially opens to the public.
1945: The United States and Britain bar a Soviet supported provisional regime in Warsaw from entering the U.N. meeting in San Francisco.
1948: The Soviet Union begins controlling the Western trains headed toward Berlin.
1949: Winston Churchill declares that the A-bomb was the only thing that kept the Soviet Union from taking over Europe.
1954: The siege of Dien Bien Phu, the last French outpost in Vietnam, begins after the Viet Minh realize it cannot be taken by direct assault.
1960: The South African government declares a state of emergency after demonstrations lead to the deaths of more than 50 Africans.
1966: An estimated 200,000 anti-war demonstrators march in New York City.
1967: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Consular Treaty, the first bi-lateral pact with the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution.
1970: U.S. forces in Vietnam down a MIG-21, the first since September 1968.
1980: President Jimmy Carter deregulates the banking industry.
1991: Albania offers a multi-party election for the first time in 50 years.
