Today in History
8 February
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8 February |
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| 1291 Afonso IV, King of Portugal (1325-57) was born | ||
| 1526 Heavy storm strikes Dutch coast, many die | ||
| 1575 University of Leiden Netherland opens | ||
| 1587 After 19 years imprisonment, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded for her part in a plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. | ||
| 1600 Vatican convicts scholar Giordano Bruno to death | ||
| 1601 Earl Robert Devereux of Essex armies draws into London | ||
| 1622 King James I disbands the English parliament | ||
| 1672 Isaac Newton reads 1st optics paper before Royal Society in London | ||
| 1690 French & Indian troops set Schenectady settlement NY on fire | ||
| 1690 Lord Halifax resigns as Lord Privy Seal | ||
| 1725 Peter the Great of Russia died and was succeeded by Catherine I. His reign saw Russia drawn increasingly into the European sphere of influence. | ||
| 1802 Simon Willard patents banjo clock | ||
| 1807 Napoleon defeats Russians in battle of Eylau | ||
| 1809 Franz I of Austria declares war on France | ||
| 1822 Maxime Du Camp, France, writer/traveler (Les Buveurs de Cendres) was born | ||
| 1828 Jules Verne, France, pioneered sci-fi (From the Earth to the Moon) was born | ||
| 1861 The southern states which had seceded from the Union agreed to set up The Confederate States of America. | ||
| 1862 Union forces took Roanoke Island, North Carolina, from the Confederacy during the American Civil War. | ||
| 1863 Prussia allied with Russia to suppress the revolution in Poland | ||
| 1883 Louis Waterman begins experiments to invents fountain pen | ||
| 1889 Flood ravages Dutch coast | ||
| 1904 The Russo-Japanese War began when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in northeast China. | ||
| 1905 Cyclone hit Tahiti & adjacent islands, killing some 10,000 people | ||
| 1909 France & Germany sign treaty about Morocco | ||
| 1910 The Boy Scouts of America movement was founded in the District of Colombia. | ||
| 1914 General Zamon becomes president of Haiti | ||
| 1916 French cruiser "Admiral Charner" torpedoed off Syrian coast, kills 374 | ||
| 1922 Radio arrives at the White House | ||
| 1923 Coal mine explosion at Dawson, New Mexico kills 120 | ||
| 1923 German NSDAP Volkischer Beobachter newspaper becomes a daily | ||
| 1924 The gas chamber was used for the first time as a form of execution. Gee Jon was put to death in Nevada for murder. | ||
| 1926 Walt Disney Studios forms | ||
| 1927 Belgian-Swiss treaty signed | ||
| 1931 Gas explosion Fire in Fushun-coal mine, Manchuria kills 3,000 | ||
| 1933 1st flight of all-metal Boeing 247 | ||
| 1934 Export-Import Bank organizes in Washington, DC | ||
| 1934 Gaston Doumergue forms new French govt | ||
| 1936 Pandit Jawaharlal follows Gandhi as chairman of India Congress Party | ||
| 1940 Lodtz, 1st large ghetto established by Nazis in Poland | ||
| 1941 Japanese armored barges cross Strait of Johore to attack Singapore | ||
| 1943 Advancing Russian troops recaptured Kursk, which they had lost to the Germans in November 1941. | ||
| 1944 U-762 sunk off Ireland | ||
| 1949 Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, was sentenced to life imprisonment for anti-state activities. | ||
| 1955 Georgi Malenkov was forced to resign the Soviet premiership, replaced by Nikolai Bulganin. | ||
| 1956 Mine disaster in Quaregnon Belgium, 8 die | ||
| 1958 Edgar Whitehead succeeds Garfield Todd as premier of South Rhodesia | ||
| 1958 French planes bomb Sakiet Tunisia, 75 die | ||
| 1960 Congress opens hearings looking into payola | ||
| 1963 Iraqi President Abdel-Karim Kassem was overthrown and killed in a military coup. | ||
| 1965 Eastern DC-7B crashes into Atlantic off Jones Beach NJ, kills 84 | ||
| 1966 The United States and Vietnam issued the Declaration of Honolulu, outlining their aims for Vietnam | ||
| 1969 Last edition of Saturday Evening Post | ||
| 1969 Meteorite weighing over 1 ton falls in Chihuahua, Mexico | ||
| 1971 South Vietnamese troops invade Laos | ||
| 1974 America's final Skylab mission, with Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue, returned to Earth. | ||
| 1977 Earthquake in SF, at 5.0, strongest since 1966 | ||
| 1978 Crown Prince Sad Abdallah al-Salim Al Sabah becomes PM of Kuwait | ||
| 1979 The United States suspended all civilian aid to Nicaragua. | ||
| 1983 Champion thoroughbred Shergar kidnapped in Ireland; never found | ||
| 1983 The Kahan Report on the Beirut Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982, condemned the Israeli government and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. | ||
| 1984 14th Winter Olympic games opens in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia | ||
| 1985 Opposition leader Kim Dae Jung returns to South-Korea | ||
| 1989 US Boeing 707 crashes into Santa Maria mountain, 145 die | ||
| 1992 16th Winter Olympic games opens in Albertville, France | ||
| 1992 Ulysses spacecraft passes Jupiter | ||
| 1993 the newly divided Czech and Slovak republics began using separate currencies for the first time. | ||
| 2000 Two small planes collide north of Chicago, killing 3, including Bob Collins | ||
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