Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 8

This is a list of selected April 8 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← April 7	April 9 →

Staging area

Images

User only ONE image at a time

• 
  Bust of Caracalla
• 
  Bust of Caracalla
• Bust of Caracalla (requires undeletion)
  Bust of Caracalla (requires undeletion)
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  Winchester Cathedral
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  Times Square
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  Petrarch
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  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
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  Yi So-yeon
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  Venus de Milo

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Hanamatsuri in Japan	multiple issues
1093 – Winchester Cathedral at Winchester in Hampshire, one of the largest cathedrals in England, was dedicated by Bishop Walkelin.	refimprove
1341 – Italian scholar and poet Petrarch took the title poet laureate at a ceremony in Rome.	refimprove section
1820 – A Greek peasant discovered a statue of a woman with its arms missing—the Venus de Milo—on the Aegean island of Milos.	competing theories of discovery
1857 – Gallaudet University, the world's only university for hearing-impaired students, was established in Washington, D.C.	date not cited, unreferenced section
1886 – Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the British House of Commons.	CN tags
1904 – British occultist and writer Aleister Crowley began transcribing The Book of the Law, one of the Holy Books of Thelema.	primary sources
1911 – Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity.	refimprove section
1992 – American tennis player Arthur Ashe announced that he had contracted HIV from blood transfusions; he spent the remainder of his life as an AIDS activist.	refimprove section
2008 – The wind turbines at the Bahrain World Trade Center, the first building to incorporate turbines into its design, became operational.	short, needs update
2013 – Two Sunni Muslim extremist groups, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Al-Nusra Front, merged to become the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS.	outdated
Philip IV of Spain (b. 1605)	refimprove section

Eligible

• 876 – Forces of the Abbasid Caliphate decisively defeated those of the Saffarid emir Ya'qub ibn Laith, forcing the latter to halt his advance into Iraq.
• 1864 – American Civil War: A decisive Confederate victory in the Battle of Mansfield stopped the advance of the Union Army's Red River Campaign.
• 1904 – Longacre Square in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, was renamed Times Square after The New York Times building.
• 1943 – Otto and Elise Hampel were executed in Berlin for their resistance activities against the Third Reich.
• 1961 – A large explosion on board the MV Dara in the Persian Gulf killed 238 people on board.
• 1968 – BOAC Flight 712 had an engine fire shortly after take-off from London Heathrow, leading to the deaths of five people on board, including flight attendant Jane Harrison, who was later awarded a posthumous George Cross for heroism.
• 2008 – On board Soyuz TMA-12, Yi So-yeon became the first Korean to go into space.
• Born/died: John II Komnenos (d. 1143) · Thomas of Tolentino (d. 1321) · Mary Stuart (b. 1605) · Betty Ford (b. 1918) · Sara Northrup Hollister (b. 1924)

Notes

• Alexios I Komnenos appears on April 5, so John II Komnenos should not appear in the same year

April 8

Capture of Princesa

• 217 – Roman emperor Caracalla was assassinated at a roadside near Harran and succeeded by his Praetorian Guard prefect Macrinus.
• 1271 – The Knights Hospitaller surrendered the Krak des Chevaliers to the army of the Mamluk sultan Baibars.
• 1740 – War of the Austrian Succession: The Royal Navy captured the Spanish ship of the line Princesa (pictured) and mustered her into British service.
• 1904 – France and the United Kingdom signed the Entente Cordiale, agreeing to a peaceful coexistence after centuries of intermittent conflict.
• 1959 – A team of computer scientists and others met to discuss the creation of a common business-oriented programming language that became COBOL.

Niels Juel (d. 1697) · Marie Byles (b. 1900) · Dead (d. 1991)

More anniversaries:

• April 7
• April 8
• April 9