THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― JULY 8

July 8 is the 189th day of the year (190th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 176 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Monday or Tuesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Thursday or Saturday (56).

NATIONAL CHOCOLATE WITH ALMONDS DAY 

1099 – First Crusade: Some 15,000 starving Christian soldiers march in a religious procession around Jerusalem as its Muslim defenders look on.

1730 – An estimated magnitude 8.7 earthquake causes a tsunami that damages more than 1,000 km (620 mi) of Chile's coastline.

1760 – French and Indian War (the Seven Years War): Battle of Restigouche ― British forces defeat French forces in last naval battle in New France. The loss of the Battle of Restigouche and the consequent inability to supply the troops, marked the end of any serious attempt by France to keep hold of their colonies in North America, and it severely curtailed any hopes for a lengthy resistance to the British by the French forces that remained. The battle was the last major engagement of the Mi'kmaq and Acadian militias before theBurying of the Hatchet Ceremony between the Mi'kmaq and the British.

1776 – The Liberty Bell is rung with reading of Declaration of Independence of the United States.

1876 – White supremacists kill five Black Republicans in Hamburg, South Carolina. The events catalyzed parties to the volatile 1876 election campaign. There were other episodes of white violence in the months before the election, including an estimated 100 blacks killed during several days in Ellenton, South Carolina, also in Aiken County. The Democrats succeeded in "redeeming" the state government and electing Wade Hampton III as governor. During the remainder of the century, they passed laws to establish single-party white supremacistrule, impose legal segregation and "Jim Crow," and disenfranchise blacks by a new constitution in 1895. This exclusion of blacks from the political system was effectively maintained into the late 1960s.

1879 – Sailing ship USS Jeannette departs San Francisco carrying an ill-fated expedition to the North Pole.  After being trapped in the ice and drifting for almost two years, the ship was released from its ice-grip, then trapped again, crushed and sunk some 300 nautical miles (560 km; 350 mi) north of the Siberian coast. De Long and most of his crew reached land, but many of them, including De Long, subsequently perished in the wastes of the Lena Delta.

1932 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level of the Great Depression, closing at 41.22.

1947 – Reports are broadcast that a UFO crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico in what became known as the Roswell UFO incident.

1960 – Francis Gary Powers is charged with espionage resulting from his flight over the Soviet Union.

1970 – President Richard Nixon delivers a special congressional message enunciating Native American self-determination as official U.S. Indian policy, leading to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975.

1994 – Kim Jong-il begins to assume supreme leadership of North Korea upon the death of his father, Kim Il-sung. Following Kim's failure to appear at important public events in 2008, foreign observers assumed that Kim had either fallen seriously ill or died. On 19 December 2011, the North Korean government announced that he had died two days earlier,[3] whereupon his third son, Kim Jong-un, was promoted to a senior position in the ruling WPK and succeeded him.[4] After his death, he was designated as the "Eternal General Secretary" of the WPK and the "Eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission", in keeping with the tradition of establishing eternal posts for the dead members of the Kim dynasty.

2011 – Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-13) is launched in the final mission of the U.S. Space Shuttle program.  The four-person crew was the smallest of any shuttle mission since STS-6 in April 1983. The mission's primary cargo was the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) Raffaello and a Lightweight Multi-Purpose Carrier (LMC), which were delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). The flight ofRaffaello marked the only time that Atlantis carried an MPLM.

2014 – Israel launches an offensive on Gaza amid rising tensions following the killing of Israeli teenagers.


Today's Births

1838 – Eli Lilly, American soldier, chemist, and businessman, founded Eli Lilly and Company (d. 1898)

1839 – John D. Rockefeller, American businessman and philanthropist, founded the Standard Oil Company (d. 1937)

1951 – Anjelica Huston, American actress and director

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.