June 8 is the 159th day of the year (160th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 206 days remaining until the end of the year.
Holidays
- Christian feast day:
- Earliest day on which Queen’s Birthday can fall, while June 14 is the latest; celebrated on the second Monday in June. (Australia, except Western Australia and Queensland)
- Bounty Day (Norfolk Island)
- Caribbean American HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
- Engineer’s Day (Peru)
- Primož Trubar Day (Slovenia)
- World Brain Tumor Day
- World Oceans Day
History
In 68, The Roman Senate proclaims Galba as emperor.
In 218, Battle of Antioch: With the support of the Syrian legions, Elagabalus defeats the forces of emperor Macrinus. He flees, but is captured near Chalcedon and later executed in Cappadocia.
In 452, Italy invaded by Attila the Hun.
In 632, Muhammad, Islamic prophet, dies in Medina and is succeeded by Abu Bakr who becomes the first caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate.
In 793, Vikings raid the abbey at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, commonly accepted as the beginning of Norse activity in the British Isles.
In 1042, Edward the Confessor becomes King of England, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England.
In 1191, Richard I arrives in Acre (Palestine) thus beginning his crusade.
In 1405, Richard le Scrope, the Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Norfolk, are executed in York on Henry IV‘s orders.
In 1504, Michaelangelo’s “David” set in place in the Palazzo of Florence, Italy
In 1690, Yadi Sakat, a Siddi general, razes the Mazagon Fort in Mumbai.
In 1723, the Honorable Society of Improvers of the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland is founded.
In 1776, American Revolutionary War: American attackers are driven back at the Battle of Trois-Rivières.
In 1786, the first commercially-made ice cream was sold in New York City by Mr. Hall.
In 1783, Laki, a volcano in Iceland, begins an eight-month eruption which kills over 9,000 people and starts a seven-year famine.
In 1789, James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in Congress.
In 1794, Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution‘s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large organized festivals all across France.
In 1815, 39 German states unite under the Act of Confederation.
In 1847, the Fielden’s Factory Act is passed by Parliament, reducing the working hours for women and children to 10 1/2 hours a day or 58 hours a week.
In 1856, A group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrives at Norfolk Island, commencing the Third Settlement of the Island.
In 1861, American Civil War: Tennessee secedes from the Union. Tennessee became the 11th and last state to secede from the Union. It was also the first state to be readmitted to the Union.
In 1862, American Civil War: Battle of Cross Keys: Confederate forces under General Stonewall Jackson save the Army of Northern Virginia from a Union assault on the James Peninsula led by General George B. McClellan.
In 1867, Coronation of Franz Joseph as King of Hungary following the Austro-Hungarian compromise (Ausgleich).
In 1872, the U.S. Congress authorized the penny postal card on this day. Congress hasn’t done anything quite this sensible since.
In 1887, Herman Hollerith applies for US patent #395,781 for the ‘Art of Compiling Statistics’, which was his punched card calculator.
In 1889, Cable Cars began service in Los Angeles. Really!
In 1889, Start of Sherlock Holmes Adventure “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (BG).
In 1896, the first car was stolen.
In 1900, Start of Sherlock Holmes “The Adventure of the 6 Napoleons” (BG).
In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.
In 1912, Carl Laemmle incorporates Universal Pictures.
In 1915, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in a disagreement over U.S. handling of the sinking of the Lusitania.
In 1928, Second Northern Expedition: The National Revolutionary Army captures Peking, whose name is changed to Beijing (“Northern Capital”).
In 1929, Margaret Bondfield is appointed Minister of Labour. She is the first woman appointed to the Cabinet of the United Kingdom.
In 1936, The First Parking Meters were invented.
In 1937, the world’s largest flower bloomed in New York Botonical Garden; it was a giant Sumatran calla lilly measuring 8 1/2 feet high and 4 feet in diameter. It’s distinctive fragrance, like that of a rotting corpse, drove people out of doors.
In 1940, World War II: The completion of Operation Alphabet, the evacuation of Allied forces from Narvik at the end of the Norwegian Campaign.
In 1941, World War II: The Allies commence the Syria–Lebanon Campaign against the possessions of Vichy France in the Levant.
In 1942, World War II: The Japanese imperial submarines I-21 and I-24 shell the Australian cities of Sydney and Newcastle.
In 1948, Milton Berle hosts the debut of Texaco Star Theater.
In 1948, John E. Rudder became the first black commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.
In 1949, The celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are named in an FBI report as Communist Party members.
In 1949, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.
In 1950, Sir Thomas Blamey becomes the only Australian-born Field Marshal in Australian history.
In 1953, An F5 tornado hits Beecher, Michigan, killing 116, injuring 844, and destroying 340 homes.
In 1953, The United States Supreme Court rules that restaurants in Washington, D.C., cannot refuse to serve black patrons.
In 1959, The USS Barbero and United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail.
In 1965, Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay. Inc. merge to form PepsiCo, Inc.
In 1966, An F-104 Starfighter collides with XB-70 Valkyrie prototype no. 2, destroying both aircraft during a photo shoot near Edwards Air Force Base. Joseph A. Walker, a NASA test pilot, and Carl Cross, a United States Air Force test pilot, are both killed.
In 1966, Topeka, Kansas, is devastated by a tornado that registers as an “F5” on the Fujita scale: The first to exceed US$100 million in damages. Sixteen people are killed, hundreds more injured, and thousands of homes damaged or destroyed.
In 1967, Six-Day War: The USS Liberty incident occurs, killing 34 and wounding 171.
In 1967, Six-Day War: The Israeli army enters Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs.
In 1968, New colonial constitution for Bermuda adopted.
In 1968, authorities announced the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy‘s funeral takes place at the St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Funeral train carries RFK’s body to Washington from New York. Burial at Arlington National Cemetery that night (10:30 P.M.). The only burial at Arlington ever held at night.
In 1972, Vietnam War: Nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc is burned by napalm, an event captured by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut moments later while the young girl is seen running down a road, in what would become an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.
In 1973, Generalissimo Francisco Franco handed over Spain’s premiership to Luis Carrero Blanco, after ruling alone for 34 years. He remained as head of state.
In 1978, 51st National Spelling Bee: Peg McCarthy wins spelling deification.
In 1978, Congress supports bankrupted New York with a $2 billion bond.
In 1978, a jury in Clark County, Nevada, ruled the so-called “Mormon will,” purportedly written by the late billionaire Howard Hughes, was a forgery.
In 1979, “The Source,” 1st computer public information service, goes on-line.
In 1982, Bluff Cove Air Attacks during the Falklands War: Fifty-six British servicemen are killed by an Argentine air attack on two landing ships, RFA Sir Galahad and RFA Sir Tristram.
In 1982, On a visit to England, Ronald Reagan rides horses with Queen Elizabeth II, lunches with Prime Minister Thatcher, and becomes the first American President to address the British Parliament.
In 1983, a U.S. presidential panel concludes man-made pollution is a major cause of acid rain.
In 1983, President Reagan unveiled a new arms control proposal offering the Kremlin a choice of curbing nuclear arsenals either through numerical limits on missiles and warheads, or a ceiling on their combined destructive power.
In 1984, Homosexuality is declared legal in the Australian state of New South Wales.
In 1986, Former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, accused of hiding a Nazi past, won election to a six-year term as president of Austria.
In 1987, New Zealand’s Labour government establishes a national nuclear-free zone under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987.
In 1987, “Sometimes you have to go above the written law.” On this day, Fawn Hall — who’d been a secretary in the Reagan White House — told congressional hearings that to protect her immediate supervisor she helped him obstruct justice…altering and shredding sensitive documents…and smuggling papers out of the White House in her clothes. Her immediate supervisor was National Security aide Oliver North…and the documents concerned the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran, then sent the profits to rebels in the Central American nation of Nicaragua in violation of a law Congress had passed.
In 1987, President Reagan lifts economic sanctions against Japan at the beginning of the Economic Summit held in Vienna.
In 1988, Nippon Airways announces that painting eyeballs on Jets cut bird collisions by 20%.
In 1988, the judge in the Iran-Contra conspiracy case ruled that Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord (SEE’-kohrd) and Albert Hakim had to be tried separately.
In 1989, Chinese Premier Li Peng (lee pung) reappeared on TV, praising a group of army soldiers, apparently for their role in crushing the student-led pro-democracy movement.
In 1992, The first World Ocean Day is celebrated, coinciding with the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In 1993, Republican businessman Richard Riordan defeated Democrat Michael Woo to become the first GOP mayor of Los Angeles since 1961.
In 1994, President Clinton returned to Oxford University, where he’d attended as a Rhodes scholar, to receive an honorary doctorate.
In 1995, The downed U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady is rescued by U.S. Marines in Bosnia.
In 1996, Declaring racial hostility was behind recent church fires in the South, President Clinton said in his weekly radio address he would devote whatever resources were needed to “smother the fires of hatred.”
In 1998, FTC brings antitrust complaint against Intel Corp., alleging its policies punish other developers of microprocessor chips.
In 1998, Honda agrees to pay $17.1 million for disconnecting anti-pollution devices in 1.6 million cars.
In 1998, Rail regulators approve $10 billion proposal to dismantle Conrail and restore competition in Northeast markets.
In 2000, Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNally dies in Baltimore, Maryland, at age 52. MacNelly’s editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller, said in 1986 that MacNelly’s editorial cartoons were “magic… I wish I could say just what combination of graphic mastery, writing skill and sheer perversity goes into Jeff’s work. I can’t, but when people say Jeff has a special perspective on the world, they are engaging in heroic understatement.” The Wall Street Journal wrote: “MacNelly’s superb draftsmanship as well as his heightened sense of the ridiculous is in the vanguard of a new generation of American cartoonists.”
MacNelly’s legacy is continued through the work of Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins, Susie MacNelly, his head writer Bill Linden and Doug Gamble. This team keeps alive Jeff MacNelly’s work on Shoe and Dave Barry‘s illustrations, as well as museum shows, fine art sales, licensing and publishing.
In 2001, Mamoru Takuma kills eight and injures 15 in a mass stabbing at an elementary school in the Osaka Prefecture of Japan.
In 2004, The first Venus Transit in well over a century takes place, the previous one being in 1882.
In 2007, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, is hit by the State’s worst storms and flooding in 30 years resulting in the death of nine people and the grounding of a trade ship, the MV Pasha Bulker.
In 2008, At least 37 miners go missing after an explosion in an Ukrainian coal mine causes it to collapse.
In 2008, At least seven people are killed and ten injured in a stabbing spree in Tokyo, Japan.
In 2009, Two American journalists are found guilty of illegally entering North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of penal labour.
In 2013, The Wedding of Princess Madeleine of Sweden and Christopher O’Neill takes place in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2014, At least 28 people are killed in an attack on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan.
In 2017, YouTuber Randy Stair aka Andrew Blaze shoots and kills three of his Weis Markets coworkers as well as himself in a Columbine-inspired attack after releasing his manifesto in the form of several files and videos involving his flash animation series based on a minor character from Nickelodeon’s Danny Phantom cartoon.
