Previous Day - Next Day
“It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.”
~ Johannes Kepler
Wikiquote (Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy.)
Image: Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion (ellipses, gravity, inertia, centripetal force) / Solar System Exploration NASA.
March 8th, 1126
Following the death of his mother Urraca, Alfonso VII is proclaimed king of Castile and León.
Wikipedia Photo: Alfonso VII king of Castile and León ● Alcazar of Segovia, Castile and León, Spain.
March 8th, 1576
Conquistador:
1576 - Spanish explorer Diego García de Palacio first sights the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Copán.
Wikipedia Image: Conquistadors (Spanish "conquerors") were soldiers, explorers, and adventurers at the service of the Spanish Empire (sailing beyond Europe, conquering territory and opening trade routes, colonizing much of the world for Spain and Portugal in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries)
● Christopher Columbus setting foot in the New World in 1492
● Conquistadors praying before a battle
● Conquistadors and their Tlaxcalan allies enter Tenochtitlan
● The surrender of Granada in 1492. Muhammad XII before Ferdinand and Isabella
● Detail of Velázquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja a contemporary morisco Spaniard, slave and afterwards freedman, assistant and trust man of Diego Velazquez
● Conquistador, jQuey-deviantart.
March 8th, 1618
German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion (ellipses, gravity, inertia, centripetal force).
Wikipedia Image: Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion (ellipses, gravity, inertia, centripetal force).
March 8th, 1655
John Casor becomes the first legally-recognized slave in England's North American colonies.
Wikipedia Painting: The Slave Ship, J. M. W. Turner's representation of the mass-murder of slaves, inspired by the Zong Massacre.
March 8th, 1702
Anne Stuart, sister of Mary II, becomes Queen regnant of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Wikipedia Painting: Anne, Queen of Great Britain; ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on March 8th, 1702. On May 1st 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, the kingdoms of England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.
March 8th, 1775
An anonymous writer, thought by some to be Thomas Paine, publishes "African Slavery in America", the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
Wikipedia Painting: Thomas Paine, thought by some to be author of "African Slavery in America".
March 8th, 1777
American Revolutionary War:
1777 - Regiments from Ansbach and Bayreuth, sent to support Great Britain, mutiny in the town of Ochsenfurt.
1782 - Gnadenhütten massacre; Ninety-six Native Americans in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, who had converted to Christianity are killed by Pennsylvania militiamen in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.
Wikipedia Paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutz; Battle of the Chesapeake, French (left) and British (right) lines; Battle of Bunker Hill, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 13, 1782, by John Singleton Copley; Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, 1781; "The surrender at Saratoga" shows General Daniel Morgan in front of a French de Vallière 4-pounder; Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by (John Trumbull, 1797).
Grand Union - Stars and Stripes Flag
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, by Howard Chandler Christy
March 8th, 1817
The New York Stock Exchange is founded.
Wikipedia Photo: The New York Stock Exchange floor, credit Associated Press; and fisheye view, credit © Geoff Sills, © Eric L Bowers.
March 8th, 1862
American Civil War:
1862 - The iron-clad CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack) is launched at Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Wikipedia Image: ● Lincoln Memorial; an American national monument built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln - located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. across from the Washington Monument.
● The northern army led by George McClellan and the southern army led by Robert E. Lee met at Antietam Creek, Maryland in September, 1862. It was a bloody battle where 13,000 Confederates and 12,000 Union troops died in just one day. McClellan had hesitated to attack before the battle thus letting the southern troops regroup. Also, he had saved reserves and refused to use them at the end of the battle thinking that Lee was holding reserves for a counterattack, even though those reserves didn't exist. The Union victory stopped Lee's northward advance and was a turning point in the war.
● Battle of Antietam / Stone Bridge at Antietam Battlefield - Sharpsburg, Maryland
● First Battle Between Ironclads: CSS Virginia/Merrimac (left) vs. USS Monitor, in 1862 at the Battle of Hampton Roads.
● Although photography was still in its infancy, war correspondents produced thousands of images, bringing the harsh realities of the frontlines to those on the home front in a new and visceral way. The Atlantic.
March 8th, 1910
French aviatrix Raymonde de Laroche becomes the first woman to receive a pilot's license.
Wikipedia.org Photo: Alexander Graham Bell, credit Fine Art Print - Granger.
March 8th, 1911
1911 - International Women's Day is launched in Copenhagen, Denmark by Clara Zetkin, leader of the Women's Office for the Social Democratic Party in Germany.
1917 - International Women's Day is launched in Saint Petersburg, mark the beginning of the February Revolution.
Wikipedia Photo: International Women's Day, Poster for Women's Day, March 8, 1914 / netglimse.
March 8th, 1916
World War I:
1916 - Battle of Dujaila; A British force unsuccessfully attempts to relieve the siege of Kut (present-day Iraq.
Post World War I:
1920 - The Arab Kingdom of Syria, the first modern Arab state to come into existence, is established.
1921 - Spanish Premier Eduardo Dato Iradier is assassinated while exiting the parliament building in Madrid.
Wikipedia Photo: Trenches on the Western Front; a British Mark IV Tank crossing a trench; Royal Navy battleship HMS Irresistible sinking after striking a mine at the Battle of the Dardanelles; a Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks, and German Albatros D.III biplanes. National Archives and Records Administration.
March 8th, 1917
United States Senate votes to limit filibusters by adopting the cloture rule
Wikipedia Photo: The U.S. Capitol is pictured on the opening day of the 112th United States Congress in Washington, January 5, 2011, credit: Jim Bourg, Reuters; Obama Health Care Speech to Joint Session of Congress, September 2009 (by Executive Office of the President of the United States).
March 8th, 1936
Daytona Beach Road Course holds its first oval stock car race.
Wikipedia Photo: Daytona Beach Road Course Daytona Beach, Ponce Inlet, Daytona Beach Shores, Florida.
National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR)
March 8th, 1937
Pre World War II:
1937 - Spanish Civil War; Battle of Guadalajara begins.
World War II:
1942 - The Dutch surrender to Japanese forces on Java.
Post World War II:
1949 - Mildred Gillars ("Axis Sally") is condemned to prison for treason.
Wikipedia Photo: Bombing of Dresden in World War II; August Schreitmüller's sculpture 'Goodness' surveys Dresden after a firestorm started by Allied bombers in 1945.
USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa and another airman on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing from a crew of 2,600; Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, who flew his aircraft into the USS Bunker Hill during a Kamikaze mission on 11 May 1945; Kamikaze Missions - Lt Yoshinori Yamaguchi's Yokosuka D4Y3 (Type 33 Suisei) "Judy" in a suicide dive against USS Essex. The dive brakes are extended and the non-self-sealing port wing tank is trailing fuel vapor and/or smoke 25 November 1944.
German V1 flying-bomb and V2 Rockets - Preparations for a Salvo Launch of V-2 Rockets in the Heidelager near Blizna (Poland) (1944), credit German History in Documents and Images GHDI.
Eastern Front (World War II); Germans race towards Stalingrad. August 1942; Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of the war, June 1941, by RIA Novosti archive; Soviet sniper Roza Shanina in 1944. About 400,000 Soviet women served in front-line duty units Caucasus Mountains, winter 1942/43; Finnish ski patrol: the invisible enemy of the Soviet Army with an unlimited supply of skis; Men of the German Engineers Corps cross a river which is swollen after the first autumn rains, to strengthen bridges linking the German positions on the central front in Russia. by Keystone / Getty Images. October 1942; Russian snipers fighting on the Leningrad front during a blizzard. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images, 1943; German soldiers surrendering to the Russians in Stalingrad, the soldier holding the white flag of surrender is dressed in white so that there could be no doubt of his intentions, a Russian soldier is on the right of the photograph. by Keystone / Getty Images, January 1943.
March 8th, 1957
Cold War - Arab–Israeli Conflict:
Egypt re-opens the Suez Canal after the Suez Crisis.
Wikipedia Image: Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea.
March 8th, 1966
1966 - A bomb planted by Irish Republicans destroys Nelson's Pillar in Dublin.
Wikipedia Photo: Irish Republican Army; Belfast, Northern Ireland.
March 8th, 1979
Philips demonstrates the Compact disc (CD) publicly for the first time.
Wikipedia Photo: Compact_Disc, The readable surface of a Compact Disc includes a spiral track wound tightly enough to cause light to diffract into a full visible spectrum
Sony launches the first consumer compact disc (CD) player - CDP-101.
March 8th, 1983
United States President Ronald Reagan calls the Soviet Union an "evil empire".
Wikipedia Photo: Official Portrait of President Reagan 1981.
March 8th, 1999
The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Wikipedia Photo: Oklahoma City bombing; was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. ● McVeigh and Nichols cited the federal government's actions against the Branch Davidian compound in the 1993 Waco Siege (shown above) as a reason they perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing ● The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building two days after the bombing. ● Charles Porter's photograph of firefighter Chris Fields holding the dying infant Baylee Almon won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1996. A similar photo was taken by Lester LaRue.
March 8th, 2004
Gulf War - Iraq War:
2004 - A new constitution is signed by Iraq's Governing Council.
Wikipedia Photo: USAF F-15Es, F-16s, and a USAF F-15 flying over burning Kuwaiti oil wells; Iraqi Army T-72 main battle tanks. The T-72 tank was a common Iraqi battle tank used in the Gulf War; F-15Es parked during Operation Desert Shield; The oil fires caused were a result of the scorched earth policy of Iraqi military forces retreating from Kuwait; Aerial view of destroyed Iraqi T-72 tank, BMP-1 and Type 63 armored personnel carriers and trucks on Highway 8 in March 1991.
March 8th, 2014
Aviation accidents and incidents:
2014 - Malaysia Airlines Flight 370; carrying a total of 239 people, disappears en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Wikipedia Photo: ● Pan AM 747 ● U.S. Airways flight 1549 also known as the "Miracle on the Hudson" navigates an exit ramp near Burlington, New Jersey, June 5, 2011 ● Passengers stand on the wings of a U.S. Airways plane as a ferry pulls up to it after it landed in the Hudson River in New York, Reuters ● U.S. Airways plane crashes into New York Hudson River, Photo: AP