June 8 is Best Friends Day
Name Your Poison Day
National Jelly-Filled Doughnut Day
June 8, 632 – Muhammad, Islamic prophet, died in Medina and was succeeded by Abu Bakr who becomes the first caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate.
In 1789, James Madison introduced twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in the House of Representatives; by 1791, ten of them were ratified by the state legislatures and become the Bill of Rights; another was eventually ratified in 1992 to become the 27th Amendment.
June 8, 1794, Robespierre inaugurated the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large organized festivals all across France. Though he was no admirer of Catholicism, he had a special dislike for atheism. He thought that belief in a supreme being was important for social order, and he liked to quote Voltaire: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”. With Robespierre’s death at the guillotine on July 28, 1794, the cult disappeared.
June 8,1845: Death of Andrew Jackson , seventh President of the United States. He died at Nashville, Tennessee aged 78. On the last day of his presidency, Jackson admitted that he had but two regrets, that he “had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.” His death was due to chronic tuberculosis, dropsy, and heart failure.
Birthday of Ida Saxton McKinley (1847), wife of
William McKinley, first lady 1897-1901
In 1856, a group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrived at Norfolk Island, commencing the Third Settlement of the Island.
June 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith applied for US patent #395,791 for the ‘Art of Applying Statistics’ – his punched card calculator.
On June 8, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.
Birthday of Barbara Pierce Bush (1925), wife of George H.W. Bush, mother of George W. Bush, first lady 1989-1993. She died on Apr 17, 2018.
Milton Berle hosted the debut of Texaco Star Theater on June 8, 1948. It aired until 1956. Milton Berle became known as “Mr. Television”.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 8, 1949.
Birthday of Tim Berners-Lee (June 8, 1955), English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, (W3C) which oversees its continued development. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. While there, he proposed (1989) a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web, which permitted people to collaborate by sharing knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. On 6 Aug 1991, the first World Wide Web site was made available to the Internet at large, giving information on a browser and how to set up a Web server.
June 8, 2009, General Motors filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the fourth largest United States bankruptcy in history.