July 8
Today's:

1099 - Christian soldiers on the First Crusade march around Jerusalem.

1608 - The first French settlement at Quebec was established by Samuel de Champlain.

1663 - King Charles II of England granted a charter to Rhode Island.

1693 - Uniforms for police in New York City were authorized.

1709 - Peter the Great defeated Charles XII at Poltava, in the Ukraine, The Swedish empire was effectively ended.

1755 - Britain broke off diplomatic relations with France as their disputes in the New World intensified.

1776 - Col. John Nixon gave the first public reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to a crowd at Independence Square in Philadelphia.

1794 - French troops captured Brussels, Belgium.

1795 - Kent County Free School changed its name to Washington College. It was the first college to be named after U.S. President George Washington. The school was established by an act of the Maryland Assembly in 1723.

1815 - Louis XVIII returned to Paris after the defeat of Napoleon.

1865 - C.E. Barnes patented the machine gun.

1879 - The first ship to use electric lights departed from San Francisco, CA.

1881 - Edward Berner, druggist in Two Rivers, WI, poured chocolate syrup on ice cream in a dish. To this time chocolate syrup had only been used for making ice-cream sodas.

1889 - The Wall Street Journal was first published.

1889 - John L. Sullivan defeated Jake Kilrain, in the last championship bare-knuckle fight. The fight lasted 75 rounds.

1907 - Florenz Ziegfeld staged his first "Follies" on the roof of the New York Theater in New York City.

1919 - U.S. President Wilson returned from the Versailles Peace Conference in France.

1947 - Demolition work began in New York City for the new permanent headquarters of the United Nations.

1950 - General Douglas MacArthur was named commander-in-chief of United Nations forces in Korea.

1953 - Notre Dame announced that the next five years of its football games would be shown in theatres over closed circuit TV.

1959 - In Bien Hoa, northeast of Saigon, Major Dale R. Buis and Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand were killed. They are the first and second names listed on Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

1960 - The Soviet Union charged Gary Powers with espionage. He was shot down in a U-2 spy plane.

1963 - All Cuban-owned assets in the United States were frozen.

1969 - The U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for the game "Twister."

1970 - The San Francisco Giant’s Jim Ray Hart became the first National League player in 59 seasons to collect six runs batted (RBI) during a single inning.

1981 - The Solar Challenger became the frist solar-powered airplane to cross the English Channel.

1986 - Kurt Waldheim was inaugurated as president of Austria despite controversy over his alleged ties to Nazi war crimes.

1993 - Charles Keating, chief of Lincoln Savings & Loan Association, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison for violating California security and fraud laws.

1997 - The Mayo Clinic and the U.S. government warned that the diet-drug combination known as "fen-phen" could cause serious heart and lung damage.

1997 - NATO invited Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to join the alliance in 1999.

2000 - J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was released in the U.S. It was the fourth Harry Potter book.

2010 - The Solar Impulse completed the first 24-hour flight by a solar powered plane.

Today's: