On This Day: January 8

This is the 8th day of the year.

Fact of the Day: Hindus

The name Hindu comes originally from the Sanskrit word sindhu, meaning 'river'. Persian settlers who moved into the main river valley in what is now Pakistan in about 1500 BC derived the Persian word Hind from Sanskrit. In time, the land beyond the river became known as Hind (from which India gets its name), and the people who lived there became known as Hindus. The same word was also the source of the modern name for the Indus River, along which the Persians settled.

Holidays

Feast day of St. Severinus of Noricum, St. Severinus of Septempeda, and St. Wulsin.

Greece: Midwife's Day or Women's Day.

Indonesia: Kassada.

Events

1815 - U.S. forces led by General Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans -- the closing engagement of the War of 1812. This occurred two weeks after the War of 1812 officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

1851 - Jean Foucault demonstrated definitively that the Earth rotates on its axis.

1867 - Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson's veto of a bill granting all adult male citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote, and the bill becomes law. It was the first law granting African-American men the right to vote.

1889 - American inventor Herman Hollerith patented his tabulator, the first device for data processing; his firm would later become one of IBM's founding companies.

1894 - Fire caused serious damage to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

1908 - A subway line opened linking the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

1916 - Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, ending a disastrous invasion of the Ottoman Empire.

1918 - President Woodrow Wilson outlined his "14 Points For Peace" after World War I.

1959 - Charles De Gaulle was inaugurated as president of France's Fifth Republic.

1964 - President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty."

1982 - AT&T's break-up took place as it was divested of its 22 Bell System companies under terms of an antitrust agreement.

1987 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average topped the 2000 mark for the first time.

1998 - Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced in New York to life in prison.

Births

1909 - Evelyn Wood, U.S. educator.

1935 - Elvis Aaron Presley, U.S. rock-and-roll singer, actor, legend.

1942 - Stephen Hawking, English physicist and mathematician.

Deaths

1642 - Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer.