June 8: Shavuot (Judaism, 2011); World Ocean Day

• 793 – Scandinavian Vikings destroyed the abbey at Lindisfarne, Northumbria, England, to begin the Viking Age.
• 1776 – American Revolutionary War: British forces defeated the Continental Army at the Battle of Trois-Rivières, the last major battle fought on Quebec soil that was part of the American colonists’ invasion of Quebec.
• 1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian political novel by English writer George Orwell about life under the fictional totalitarian government of Oceania, was first published.
• 1972 – Vietnam War: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road after being burned by napalm.
• 2004 – The first transit of Venus since 1882 (pictured) took place.
• 2008 – A Japanese man drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, then proceeded to stab at least 12 people with a dagger before being apprehended.