March 8 is:
National Peanut Cluster Day
International (Working) Women’s Day
1618 – Johannes Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion. The three laws are:
- The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
- A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
- The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
Publication of Federalist Paper #66: Objections to the Power of the Senate To Sit as a Court for Impeachments Further Considered written by Alexander Hamilton in 1788. Hamilton continues his arguments for the process of impeachment in this paper.
1817 – The New York Stock Exchange was founded.
Birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841), American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.
1874 Death of Millard Fillmore , thirteenth President of the United States. He became President when Zachary Taylor died in office. Fillmore died in Buffalo, New York at age 74 after suffering a stroke.
March 8, 1918 – The first cases of the deadly Spanish flu virus are reported. The 1918 flu pandemic infected 500 million people across the world and killed 50 to 100 million of them, 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population.
1930 – Death of William Howard Taft , twenty-seventh President of the United States and tenth Chief Justice.
Taft was an avid baseball fan, but contrary to myth he did not create the seventh-inning stretch, which was custom decades earlier. He was, however, the first American president to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game, at Griffith Stadium, Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1910.
He was the first president to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was 72.