08 August History
- 1306 - King Wenceslas of Poland is murdered.
- 1570 - Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of St. Germain, ending the third war of religion and giving religious freedom to the Huguenots.
- 1636 - The invading armies of Spain, Austria and Bavaria are stopped at the village of St.-Jean-de-Losne, only 50 miles from France.
- 1648 - Ibrahim, the sultan of Istanbul, is thrown into prison, then assassinated.
- 1786 - Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michael-Gabriel Baccard become the first men to climb Mont Blanc in France.
- 1844 - Brigham Young is chosen to head the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.
- 1863 - Confederate President Jefferson Davis refuses General Robert E. Lee's resignation.
- 1876 - Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.
- 1899 - The first household refrigerating machine is patented.
- 1925 - The first national congress of the Ku Klux Klan opens.
- 1937 - The Japanese Army occupies Beijing.
- 1940 - The German Luftwaffe attacks Great Britain for the first time, begining the Battle of Britain.
- 1942 - U.S. Marines capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.
- 1944 - U.S. forces complete the capture of the Marianas Islands.
- 1945 - The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
- 1950 - U.S. troops repel the first North Korean attempt to overrun them at the battle of Naktong Bulge, which continued for 10 days.
- 1963 - The "Great Train Robbery"
- 1974 - President Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal.
08 August Birthdays
- 1865 - Matthew A. Henson, explorer with Robert Peary who first reached the North Pole (Though some recent scholarship disputes this claim).
- 1883 - Emilano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader.
- 1896 - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling.
- 1901 - Ernest Orlando Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics.
- 1908 - Arthur J. Goldburg, labor lawyer instrumental in the merger of the Amercian Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
- 1937 - Dustin Hoffman, American actor.