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On February 8, 1915, the silent film "The Birth of a Nation" by D. W. Griffith premiered in Los Angeles — technically revolutionary but infamous for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and explicit racism. The film provoked racial riots in several cities and was the first to be screened at the White House, for President Woodrow Wilson.

On February 8, 1963, the Baath party carried out a coup in Iraq and killed Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, who had governed the country since the 1958 revolution. The coup was covertly supported by the CIA, which provided lists of communists for elimination. The Baath party would govern Iraq, with interruptions, until the American invasion of 2003.

On February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on the orders of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I of England, after nineteen years of imprisonment. Mary had been accused of conspiring to murder Elizabeth and seize the throne. Her execution triggered a diplomatic crisis with Scotland and Spain, which the following year sent its Spanish Armada.