Today’s GK Facts in History : 8 August
Today’s GK Facts in History
Today’s GK Facts in History for UPSC/IAS Exams
The GK Facts section of Miliposts aims to help every competitive exam aspirant to revise the day comfortably.
8 August
2008: Georgia invades South Ossetia, triggering the Five-Day War between Georgia and Russia.
2007: An EF2 tornado hits Brooklyn, New York, the first in that city since 1889.
2000: 136 years after her sinking, following her successful attack on the USS Housatonic in the outer harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate submarine HL Hunley surfaces.
1990: Iraq incorporates the state of Kuwait as its 19th province, six days after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
1989: NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia begins its eighth flight, NASA’s 30th shuttle mission.
1988: Angola, Cuba and South Africa signed a ceasefire in the border war in 1966.
1983: Brigadier General Efraín Ríos Montt is removed from the presidency of Guatemala in the country’s second military coup in 17 months.
1979: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein hangs 22 political opponents.
1978: Pioneer-Venus 2 was launched to probe the atmosphere of Venus.
1974: President Richard Nixon resigns as a result of the Watergate scandal.
1964: M. Ashman, author of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, and founding member of TED Global, an international organization dedicated to spreading valuable ideas.
1963: England’s “Great Train Robbery” £2.6 million ($7.3 million) stolen
1950: US troops thwarted North Korea’s first attempt at the Battle of Naktong Bulge, which lasted ten days.
1948 – Svetlana Y. Savitskaya, the Soviet cosmonaut, was the first woman to walk in space (July 25, 1984).
1945: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
1944: The US Army completes the capture of the Mariana Islands.
1942 – US troops capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.
1940: The German Luftwaffe invades Britain for the first time, opening the Battle of Britain.
1937 – Japanese forces occupy Dustin Hoffman, American actor, Beijing.
1925: The first national convention of the Ku Klux Klan begins.
1908: Arthur J. Goldberg, a labour lawyer, was instrumental in merging the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
1901 – Ernest Orlando Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics winner.
1899: The first domestic refrigerator is patented.
1896 – Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings, author of The Yearling.
1883 – Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader.
1876: Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.
1865: Matthew A. Henson, the discoverer with Robert Peary, first reached the North Pole (although some recent scholarship disputes this claim).
1863: Federal President Jefferson Davis rejects the resignation of General Robert E. Lee.
1844: Brigham Young is elected leader of the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.
1786: Jacques Balmat and Dr Michel-Gabriel Packard become the first people to climb Mont Blanc in France.
1648 – Sultan Ibrahim of Istanbul is imprisoned and later assassinated.
1636: The invading armies of Spain, Austria, and Bavaria are stopped in the town of Saint-Jean-de-Losne, just 50 miles from France.
1570: Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of Saint Germain, ending the Third War of Religions and granting religious freedom to the Huguenots.
1306: Assassination of King Wenceslaus of Poland.
10 GK Facts this Day in History