August 17

• August 17, 1743
  By the Treaty of Åbo, Sweden cedes southeast Finland to Russia, ending Sweden's failed war with Russia
• August 17, 1786
  Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, dies, and his nephew Frederick William II succeeds
• August 17, 1807
  Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat, popularly known as the Clermont, begin heading up New York's Hudson River on its successful round-trip to Albany and becomes the first commercially successful steamboat
• August 17, 1812
  Napoleon Bonaparte's army defeats the Russians at the Battle of Smolensk during the Russian retreat to Moscow
• August 17, 1869
  Oxford beats Harvard on the Thames River in the first international boat race
• August 17, 1877
  Asaph Hall, an American astronomer, discovered the Mars moon Phobos
• August 17, 1945
  Indonesia declares independence from Netherlands
• August 17, 1960
  Gabon gains independence from France
• August 17, 1970
  Venera 7, the first man-made spacecraft to land successfully on another planet, and to transmit data from there back to Earth, is launched by USSR
• August 17, 1982
  The first commercially available compact discs are released to the public in Germany
• August 17, 1987
  Rudolf Hess, a prominent politician in Nazi Germany, commits suicide by hanging himself with an electrical flex in his cell at age 93 in Spandau Prison in Berlin, Germany, where he served 46 years
• August 17, 1998
  Decline in commodity prices triggers financial crisis in Russia and discredits the government of President Boris Yeltsin
• August 17, 2008
  Michael Phelps wins his record eighth gold medal of the Beijing Games, in the 4x100 medley relay, in record time of 3:29.34 and holds the record for most gold medals at an Olympics event

March 8

• March 8, 1403
  Bayezid I, fourth sultan of Turkey, dies at age 42, which triggers 11 years of civil war between his sons
• March 8, 1618
  Johannes Kepler comes up with his Third Law of Planetary Motion, which captures the relationship between the distance of planets from the Sun, and their orbital periods
• March 8, 1722
  Afghan monarch Mir Mahmud Hotaki occupies Persia and overthrows the Safavid Shah Sultan Husayn, bringing Hotaki Empire to its peak
• March 8, 1782
  The Gnadenhutten massacre takes place as some 90 Christian Delaware Indians are slain by militiamen in Ohio in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians
• March 8, 1801
  British defeat French at the Second Battle of Abukir driving them out from Abukir
• March 21, 1801
  British expeditionary corps under Sir Ralph Abercrombie defeat the French army under General Menou in the Battle of Alexandria during Anglo-Ottoman land offensive
• March 8, 1817
  New York Stock Exchange is formalized and established its first quarters in a rented room at 40 Wall Street
• March 8, 1862
  On the second day of the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, Confederate forces, including some Indian troops, under General Earl Van Dorn surprise Union troops, but the Union troops win the battle
• March 8, 1886
  German engineers Daimler and Maybach install Grandfather Clock engine into stagecoach, secretly brought into the house, making the first four-wheeled vehicle
• March 8, 1911
  International Women's Day, proposed by socialist communist leader Clara Zetkin to promote equal rights, is first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland
• March 8, 1917
  February Revolution, involving mass demonstrations and armed clashes with police and gendarmes, breaks out in Petrograd due to a number of economic and social problems, which were compounded by the impact of World War I
• March 8, 1963
  Syrian Arab Republic Revolution Day, a military coup in Syria, is performed by the Military Committee of the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party
• March 8, 1965
  First US combat forces arrive in South Vietnam, 3,500 Marines
• March 8, 1979
  Philips, a Dutch diversified technology company, publicly demonstrates compact disc, a digital optical disc data storage, for the first time
• March 8, 1980
  Tbilisi Rock Festival, the first festival of rock music in the Soviet Union, kicks off
• March 8, 2014
  Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 airliner en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, disappears over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board