July 8 1497 - Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama left Lisbon in search of a sea route to India.

1709 - Peter the Great of Russia with 50,000 men defeated Charles XII of Sweden with 20,000 men at the battle of Poltava. Only 1,500 Swedes escaped and the battle ended Sweden's military might.

1758 - The French under General Montcalm defeated the British under General Abercromby despite superior forces at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga in what is now New York State.

1822 - Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet, drowned off Leghorn while sailing in the Gulf of Spezia in Italy.

1859 - Oscar I, king of Sweden and Norway, died. King from 1844, he was a liberal reformer early in his reign but after the 1848 revolutions in Europe became more conservative.

1943 - Jean Moulin, hero of the French resistance, died. Known as "Max", he coordinated resistance in occupied France but was captured and tortured by the Gestapo and died of his injuries.

1944 - Allied naval cruisers and destroyers bombarded Japanese-held Guam in World War II.

1957 - The first submarine to circumnavigate the world, the U.S.S. Gudgeon, set sail from Pearl Harbor.

1976 - Former U.S. president Richard Nixon was disbarred by a New York court after his obstruction of justice during the Watergate affair.

1990 - Albania's communist rulers, rocked by unprecedented public dissent, fired their hardline interior minister and said nearly 5,000 refugees packed into foreign embassies could leave the country.

1992 - Austrian president Kurt Waldheim formally stepped down and was replaced by Thomas Klestil.

1994 - Kim Il-Sung, North Korea's authoritarian "great leader" since the founding of the state in 1948, died of a heart attack at 82.

1996 - Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan crowned his marathon bid for power with a narrow confidence vote victory that shattered secular Turkey's decades-old taboo against political Islam.

1996 - The International Court of Justice ruled that the use or threat of nuclear weapons in war should be outlawed.

1999 - Former Apollo astronaut Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr, who in 1969 became the third person to walk on the moon, was killed in an accident. He was 69.

2000 - A U.S. attempt to intercept and destroy a target dummy warhead in space over the Pacific Ocean failed when the rocket did not separate from its booster.

2000 - President Vladimir Putin set out his diagnosis of Russia's ills in his first state of the nation address.