What happened today
1942
Famous birthdays
1895
Get history's greatest tales
Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for a blast from the past each week in your inbox.
more events on May 8
-
1995
Jacques Chirac is elected president of France.
-
1984
The Soviet Union announces it will not participate in Summer Olympics planned for Los Angeles.
-
1967
Boxer Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing induction in U.S. Army.
-
1958
President Dwight Eisenhower orders the National Guard out of Little Rock as Ernest Green becomes the first black to graduate from an Arkansas public school.
-
1952
Beth Henley, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Crimes of the Heart).
-
Allied fighter-bombers stage the largest raid of the war on North Korea.
-
1945
The final surrender of German forces is celebrated as VE (Victory Europe) day.
-
1942
The Battle of the Coral Sea between the Japanese Navy and the U.S. Navy ends.
-
1940
Peter Benchley, novelist (Jaws, The Deep).
-
German commandos in Dutch uniforms cross the Dutch border to hold bridges for the advancing German army.
-
1937
Thomas Pynchon, novelist (Gravity’s Rainbow).
-
1933
Mahatma Gandhi—actual name Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—begins a hunger strike to protest British oppression in India.
-
1930
Gary Snyder, beat poet.
-
1928
Theodore Sorensen, advisor to John F. Kennedy.
-
1920
Sloan Wilson, American author (The man in the Gray Flannel Suit, A Summer Place).