On May 8, 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto discovered the Mississippi River.
In 1932 boxing champion Sonny Liston was born in St. Francis County, Ark.
In 1936 James R. Thompson, who would become governor of Illinois (1976-90), was born in Chicago.
In 1944 the first eye bank was established, in New York City.
In 1973 militant American Indians surrendered after holding the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 71 days. (Wounded Knee was the site of the Army’s 1890 massacre of 300 Native Americans.)
In 1978 David Berkowitz pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn courtroom to six murder charges in the “Son of Sam” shootings that had terrified New Yorkers.
In 1999 The Citadel, South Carolina’s formerly all-male military school, graduated its first female cadet, Nancy Ruth Mace.
In 2002 FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee that an FBI memo from Phoenix warning that several Arabs were suspiciously training at a U.S. aviation school would not have led officials to the Sept. 11 hijackers even if they had followed up the warning with more vigor.
In 2006 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush, proposing “new solutions” to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian head of state to an American president in 27 years.
