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Made for the 250thOn this day › June 8
What happened on June 8 in American history
June 8 is the 159th day of the year (the 160th in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 18 stories from June 8 spanning 1776 to 2009. Among them: in 1776, Thompson walks into a swamp at Trois-Rivières; 200 Americans captured, the Quebec invasion is broken; and in 1789, Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention.
1776Member story · 1776 Club
Thompson walks into a swamp at Trois-Rivières; 200 Americans captured, the Quebec invasion is broken
A local farmer leads the 2,000-man column off the road as British reinforcements land behind them, cutting off any retreat north.
1789
Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention
Drawing on more than two hundred proposals from state ratifying conventions, he moves to revise the Constitution before its opponents can dismantle it.
1861
Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last
Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
1862Member story · 1776 Club
Ewell routs Frémont at Cross Keys; Stahel's brigade broken, Union pursuit collapses
McClellan's expected Shenandoah reinforcements stall as Jackson's Valley army holds both Union columns at bay.
1887Member story · 1776 Club
Hollerith files "Art of Compiling Statistics"; holes punched in cards will read back by machine
The Columbia-trained statistician files his first patent application, describing a system that stores census data as punched holes and retrieves it electromechanically.
1906
Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act; no proclamation needed from Congress to seal off federal land
For decades, pot hunters have stripped pottery and bones from Chaco Canyon and across the Southwest. The president can now designate national monuments alone, by proclamation.
1949Member story · 1776 Club
Harcourt Brace publishes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; the author is in a sanatorium, too ill to mark the day
The American first printing of 20,000 copies sells out almost immediately, typed out by Orwell himself through fever and bloody coughing fits at a remote farmhouse on Jura.
1953Member story · 1776 Club
A tornado a quarter-mile wide tears through Beecher; 116 are dead, half of them children
The funnel touched down at 8:30 p.m. in Mt. Morris Township and drove 18.6 miles through Genesee County, leaving 113 of its dead in one suburb alone.
1953Member story · 1776 Club
Supreme Court rules unanimously: Washington's 1873 anti-discrimination law still stands
Mary Church Terrell's 1950 walk into Thompson's diner on 14th Street ends here; D.C. restaurants may no longer refuse to serve Black patrons.
1959Member story · 1776 Club
USS Barbero surfaces off Florida and fires the mail; 3,000 letters land at Mayport 22 minutes later
The Regulus missile that normally carries a nuclear warhead delivers Post Office commemorative covers addressed to Eisenhower and postmasters around the world.
1966Member story · 1776 Club
Walker's F-104 clips the Valkyrie's wingtip; both aircraft are down over the Mojave
The formation was a GE publicity shoot, unauthorized by the Air Force; Walker and XB-70 co-pilot Maj. Carl Cross are dead.
1967Member story · 1776 Club
Israeli jets and torpedo boats hit USS Liberty; 34 sailors are dead, 171 wounded
The signals intelligence ship was sailing in international waters off Sinai, monitoring a six-day-old war, when the 23-minute assault began.
1968Member story · 1776 Club
James Earl Ray caught at Heathrow; a ticket agent spots his name on a watchlist
The fugitive, traveling as Ramon George Sneyd on a false Canadian passport and bound for Brussels, is taken into custody two months after King's death in Memphis.
1972Member story · 1776 Club
A napalm strike hits fleeing civilians near Trảng Bàng; a nine-year-old girl runs burning down the road
An RVNAF pilot mistakes the group near the Caodai Temple for enemy troops; a photographer is there as Kim Phúc runs screaming from the smoke.
1982Member story · 1776 Club
Argentine jets bomb British troop ships at Fitzroy; Sir Galahad burns, 48 dead
Nine A-4 Skyhawks hit Sir Galahad with three bombs as she sat laden with Welsh Guards; BBC cameras catch helicopters winching survivors from the smoke.
1995Member story · 1776 Club
Marines pull O'Grady from Bosnia; six days of bugs, grass, and near-misses end in seven minutes on the ground
Two CH-53s lift off USS Kearsarge before dawn, touch down in a rocky pasture, and depart under small-arms fire and three shoulder-launched missiles, all of which miss.
2007Member story · 1776 Club
Atlantis clears the pad with the heaviest station payload the shuttle has ever flown
Sturckow's seven-member crew carries the S3/S4 truss and a pair of solar arrays to an ISS starved for power to grow.
2009Member story · 1776 Club
Clinton lands in Pyongyang; Kim pardons two American journalists held since spring
Euna Lee and Laura Ling, seized at the Tumen River and sentenced to twelve years of hard labor, fly home to Los Angeles before sunrise.
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