08 September History
- 1504 - Michelangelo's 13-foot marble statue of David is unveiled in Florence, Italy.
- 1529 - The Ottoman Sultan Suleiman re-enters Buda and establishes John Zapolyai as the puppet king of Hungary.
- 1565 - Spanish explorers found St. Augustine, Florida, the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States.
- 1628 - John Endecott arrives with colonists at Salem, Massachusetts, where he will become the governor.
- 1644 - The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam surrenders to the British fleet that sails into its harbor. Five years later, the British change the name to New York.
- 1755 - British forces under William Johnson defeat the French and the Indians at the Battle of Lake George.
- 1760 - The French surrender the city of Montreal to the British.
- 1845 - A French column surrenders at Sidi Brahim in the Algerian War.
- 1863 - Confederate Lieutenant Dick Dowling thwarts a Union naval landing at Sabine Pass, northeast of Galveston, Texas.
- 1903 - Between 30,000 and 50,000 Bulgarian men, women and children are massacred in Monastir by Turkish troops seeking to check a threatened Macedonian uprising.
- 1906 - Robert Turner invents the automatic typewriter return carriage.
- 1915 - Germany begins a new offensive in Argonne on the Western Front.
- 1921 - Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., is named the first Miss America.
- 1925 - Germany is admitted into the League of Nations.
- 1935 - Senator Huey Long of Louisiana is shot to death in the state capitol, allegedly by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr.
- 1944 - Germany's V-2 offensive against England begins.
- 1945 - Korea is partitioned by the Soviet Union and the United States.
- 1951 - Japanese representatives sign a peace treaty in San Francisco.
- 1955 - The United States, Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand sign the mutual defense treaty that established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
- 1960 - Penguin Books in Britain is charged with obscenity for trying to publish the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterly's Lover.
- 1960 - President Eisenhower dedicates NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- 1971 - The Kennedy Center opens in Washington, DC with a performance of Leonard Bernstein's Mass.
- 1972 - Arab terrorists kill 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
- 1974 - President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard M. Nixon for any crimes arising from the Watergate scandal he may have committed while in office.
08 September Birthdays
- 1841 - Antonin Dvorak, composer and violinist.
- 1886 - Siegfried Sassoon, British author and poet famous for his anti-war writing about World War I.
- 1889 - Robert A. Taft, U.S. Senator from Ohio who unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination from the 1940s until 1952.
- 1900 - Claude Pepper, Democratic senator and congressman from Florida, champion of senior citizens rights.
- 1922 - Sid Caesar, comedian and television star, best known for "Your Show of Shows," and "The Sid Caesar Show."
- 1925 - Peter Sellers, English comic actor, famous for his role as Inspector Clouseau.
- 1932 - Patsy Cline, country singer ("Crazy", "I Fall to Pieces").
- 1933 - Michael Frayn, playwright (A Very Private Life, Noises Off).
- 1947 - Ann Beattie, writer (Chilly Scenes of Winter, Picturing Will).