March 8 -Events

Events

• 1010 – Ferdowsi completes his Shāhnāmeh.
• 1126 – Alfonso VII is proclaimed king of Castile and León, after the death of his mother Urraca.
• 1655 – John Casor becomes the first legally-recognized slave in Britain's North American colonies.
• 1702 – Anne Stuart, sister of Mary II, becomes Queen regnant of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
• 1722 – The Safavid Empire of Iran is defeated by an army from Afghanistan at The Battle of Gulnabad, pushing Iran into anarchy.
• 1775 – Thomas Paine's "African Slavery in America," the first article in the American colonies calling for theemancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery, is published.
• 1777 – Regiments from Ansbach and Bayreuth, sent to support Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War, mutiny in the town of Ochsenfurt.
• 1782 – Gnadenhütten massacre: Ninety-six Native Americans in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, who had converted toChristianity are killed by Pennsylvania militiamen in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.
• 1817 – The New York Stock Exchange is founded.
• 1844 – King Oscar I ascends to the thrones of Sweden and Norway.
• 1862 – American Civil War: The iron-clad CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack) is launched at Hampton Roads, Virginia.
• 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 – The U.S. Senate votes to limit filibusters by adopting the cloture rule.
• 1917 – International Women’s Day protests in St. Petersburg contributed to the February Revolution and ultimately led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, ending the Romanov dynasty in Russia.
• 1921 – Spanish Premier Eduardo Dato Iradier is assassinated while exiting the parliament building in Madrid.
• 1924 – The Castle Gate mine disaster kills 172 coal miners near Castle Gate, Utah.
• 1936 – Daytona Beach Road Course holds their first oval stock car race.
• 1942 – World War II: The Dutch surrender to Japanese forces on Java.
• 1949 – Mildred Gillars ("Axis Sally") is condemned to prison on count of treason
• 1957 – Egypt re-opens the Suez Canal after the Suez Crisis.
• 1957 – The 1957 Georgia Memorial to Congress, which petitions the U.S. Congress to declare the ratification of the 14th & 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution null and void, is adopted by the state of Georgia.
• 1957 – Ghana joins the United Nations.
• 1963 – The Ba'ath Party comes to power in Syria in a Coup d'état by a clique of quasi-leftist Syrian Army officers calling themselves the National Council of the Revolutionary Command.
• 1966 – A bomb planted by young Irish protesters destroys Nelson's Pillar in Dublin.
• 1974 – Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris, France.
• 1978 – The first radio episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, is transmitted on BBC Radio 4.
• 1979 – Philips demonstrates the Compact Disc publicly for the first time.
• 1983 – President Ronald Reagan calls the Soviet Union an "evil empire".
• 1985 – A failed assassination attempt on Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut, Lebanon, kills at least 45 and injures 175 others.
• 1999 – The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing.
• 2004 – A new constitution is signed by Iraq's Governing Council.