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Our on this day in history archives contain over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few more of them:

May 8 is the 128th day of the year (129th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 237 days remain until the end of the year.

EVENTS

1360 – Treaty of Brétigny drafted between King Edward III of England and King John II of France (the Good).

1373 – Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic and anchoress, experiences the deathbed visions described in her Revelations of Divine Love.

1429 – Joan of Arc lifts the Siege of Orléans, turning the tide of the Hundred Years' War.

1541 – Hernando de Soto stops near present-day Walls, Mississippi, and sees the Mississippi River (then known by the Spanish as Río de Espíritu Santo, the name given to it by Alonso Álvarez de Pineda in 1519).

1639 – William Coddington founds Newport, Rhode Island.

1842 – A train derails and catches fire in Paris, killing between 52 and 200 people.

1846 – Mexican–American War: American forces led by Zachary Taylor defeat a Mexican force north of the Rio Grande in the first major battle of the war.

1877 – At Gilmore's Gardens in New York City, the first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show opens.

1886 – Pharmacist John Pemberton first sells a carbonated beverage named "Coca-Cola" as a patent medicine.

1927 – Attempting to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Paris to New York, French war heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli disappear after taking off aboard The White Bird biplane.

1933 – Mohandas Gandhi begins a 21-day fast of self-purification and launched a one-year campaign to help the Harijan movement.

1945 – The Halifax riot starts when thousands of civilians and servicemen rampage through Halifax, Nova Scotia.

1970 – The Beatles release their 12th and final studio album Let It Be.

1972 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces his order to place naval mines in major North Vietnamese ports in order to stem the flow of weapons and other goods to that nation.

1976 – The rollercoaster The New Revolution, the first steel coaster with a vertical loop, opens at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

1978 – The first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler.

1980 – The World Health Organization confirms the eradication of smallpox.

2019 – British 17-year-old Isabelle Holdaway is reported to be the first patient ever to receive a genetically modified phage therapy to treat a drug-resistant infection.

2021 – A car bomb explodes in front of a school in Kabul, capital city of Afghanistan killing at least 55 people and wounding over 150.

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