January 8
day of the year
January 8 is the eighth day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 357 days remain until the end of the year (358 in leap years).
Events
Pre-1600
307 – Sima Chi becomes emperor of the Jin dynasty in succession to his brother, Sima Zhong, despite a challenge from his other brother, Sima Ying.
871 – Æthelred I and Alfred the Great lead a West Saxon army to repel an invasion by Danelaw Vikings.
1297 – François Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, leads his men to capture the fortress protecting the Rock of Monaco, establishing his family as the rulers of Monaco.
1454 – The papal bull Romanus Pontifex awards the Kingdom of Portugal exclusive trade and colonization rights to all of Africa south of Cape Bojador.
1499 – Louis XII of France marries Anne of Brittany in accordance with a law set by his predecessor, Charles VIII.
1547 – The first Lithuanian-language book, the Catechism of Martynas Mažvydas, is published in Königsberg.
1601–1900
1735 – The premiere of George Frideric Handel's Ariodante takes place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
1746 – Second Jacobite rising: Bonnie Prince Charlie occupies Stirling.
1790 – George Washington delivers the first State of the Union address in New York City.
1806 – The Dutch Cape Colony in southern Africa becomes the British Cape Colony as a result of the Battle of Blaauwberg.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “January 8” is day of the year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through January and year, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2234. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600, 1297, 1454 and 1499.
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This entry incorporates text from “January 8” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.