more events on August 8
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2008
Georgia invades South Ossetia, touching off a five-day war between Georgia and Russia.
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2007
An EF2 tornado hits Brooklyn, New York, the first in that borough since 1889.
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2000
The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is raised to surface, 136 years after it sank following its successful attack on USS Housatonic in the outer harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
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1990
Iraq annexes the state of Kuwait as its 19th province, six days after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
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1989
NASA Space Shuttle Columbia begins its eighth flight, NASA’s 30th shuttle mission.
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1988
Angola, Cuba and South Africa sign a cease-fire treaty in the border war that began in 1966.
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1983
Brigadier General Efrain Rios Montt is deposed as president of Guatemala in the country’s second military coup in 17 months.
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1979
Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein executes 22 political opponents.
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1978
Pioneer-Venus 2 is launched to probe the atmosphere of Venus.
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1974
President Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal.
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1964
M. Ashman, author, co-editor of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, and a founding member of TED Global, the international organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.
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1963
England’s “Great Train Robbery;” 2.6 million pounds ($7.3 million) is stolen
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1950
U.S. troops repel the first North Korean attempt to overrun them at the Battle of Naktong Bulge, which continued for 10 days.
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1948
Svetlana Y Savitskaya, Soviet cosmonaut, the first woman to walk in space (July 25, 1984).
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1945
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1944
U.S. forces complete the capture of the Marianas Islands.
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1942
U.S. Marines capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.
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1940
The German Luftwaffe attacks Great Britain for the first time, beginning the Battle of Britain.
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1937
Dustin Hoffman, American actor.
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The Japanese Army occupies Beijing.
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1925
The first national congress of the Ku Klux Klan opens.
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1908
Arthur J. Goldberg, labor lawyer instrumental in the merger of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
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1901
Ernest Orlando Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics.
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1899
The first household refrigerating machine is patented.
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1896
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling.
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1883
Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader.
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1876
Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.
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1865
Matthew A. Henson, explorer with Robert Peary who first reached the North Pole (though some recent scholarship disputes this claim).
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1863
Confederate President Jefferson Davis refuses General Robert E. Lee‘s resignation.
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1844
Brigham Young is chosen to head the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.
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1786
Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard become the first men to climb Mont Blanc in France.
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1648
Ibrahim, the sultan of Istanbul, is thrown into prison, then assassinated.
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1636
The invading armies of Spain, Austria and Bavaria are stopped at the village of St.-Jean-de-Losne, only 50 miles from France.
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1570
Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of St. Germain, ending the third war of religion and giving religious freedom to the Huguenots.
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1306
King Wenceslas of Poland is murdered.