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more events on May 10
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1994
Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s first black president.
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1960
The USS Nautilus completes the first circumnavigation of the globe underwater.
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1944
Judith Jamison, American ballerina.
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1941
England’s House of Commons is destroyed during the worst of the London Blitz: 550 German bombers drop 100,000 incendiary bombs.
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1940
Winston Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister.
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German forces begin a blitzkrieg of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, skirting France’s “impenetrable” Maginot Line.
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1937
Arthur Kopit, American playwright.
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1933
Nazis begin burning books by “unGerman” writers such as Heinrich Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
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1928
WGY-TV in Schenectady, New York, begins regular television programming.
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1924
J. Edgar Hoover is appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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1920
Richard Adams, English novelist (Watership Down).
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1917
Allied ships get destroyer escorts to fend off German attacks in the Atlantic.
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1908
Carl Albert, U.S. politician.
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1902
David O. Selznick, film producer (Gone with the Wind, Rebecca).
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1899
Fred Astaire (Frederick Austerlitz), American dancer and actor.