1306: King Wenceslas of Poland is murdered.
1570: Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of St. Germain, ending the third war of religion and giving religious freedom to the Huguenots.
1636: The invading armies of Spain, Austria and Bavaria are stopped at the village of St.-Jean-de-Losne, only 50 miles from France.
1648: Ibrahim, the sultan of Istanbul, is thrown into prison, then assassinated.
1786: Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard become the first men to climb Mont Blanc in France.
1844: Brigham Young is chosen to head the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.
1863: Confederate President Jefferson Davis refuses General Robert E. Lee's resignation.
1876: Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.
1899: The first household refrigerating machine is patented.
1925: The first national congress of the Ku Klux Klan opens.
1937: The Japanese Army occupies Beijing.
1940: The German Luftwaffe attacks Great Britain for the first time, beginning the Battle of Britain.
1942: U.S. Marines capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.
1944: U.S. forces complete the capture of the Marianas Islands.
1945: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
1950: U.S. troops repel the first North Korean attempt to overrun them at the Battle of Naktong Bulge, which continued
for 10 days.
1963: England's "Great Train Robbery;" 2.6 million pounds ($7.3 million) is stolen
1974: President Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal.
1978: Pioneer-Venus 2 is launched to probe the atmosphere of Venus.
1979: Iraq's president Saddam Hussein executes 22 political opponents.
1983: Brigadier General Efrain Rios Montt is deposed as president of Guatemala in the country's second military coup in
17 months.
1988: Angola, Cuba and South Africa sign a cease-fire treaty in the border war that began in 1966.
1989: NASA Space Shuttle Columbia begins its eighth flight, NASA's 30th shuttle mission.
1990: Iraq annexes the state of Kuwait as its 19th province, six days after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
2000: The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is raised to surface, 136 years after it sank following its successful attack
on USS Housatonic in the outer harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
2007: An EF2 tornado hits Brooklyn, New York, the first in that borough since 1889.
2008: Georgia invades South Ossetia, touching off a five-day war between Georgia and Russia.
Born on August 8
1865: Matthew A. Henson, explorer with Robert Peary who first reached the North Pole (though some recent scholarship
disputes this claim).
1883: Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader.
1896: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling.
1901: Ernest Orlando Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics.
1908: Arthur J. Goldberg, labor lawyer instrumental in the merger of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations.
1937: Dustin Hoffman, American actor.
1948: Svetlana Y Savitskaya, Soviet cosmonaut, the first woman to walk in space (July 25, 1984).
1964: M. Ashman, author, co-editor of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, and a founding
member of TED Global, the international organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.