THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― AUGUST 6

August 6 is the 218th day of the year (219th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 147 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Tuesday or Wednesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Friday or Sunday (56).

NATIONAL ROOT BEER FLOAT DAY 

1777 – American Revolutionary War: The bloody Battle of Oriskany prevents American relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix.

1806 – Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates, ending the Holy Roman Empire.

1862 – American Civil War: The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

1915 – World War I ― Battle of Sari Bair ―  The Allies mount a diversionary attack timed to coincide with a major Allied landing of reinforcements at Suvla Bay.

1944 – The Warsaw Uprising occurs on August 1. It is brutally suppressed and all able-bodied men in Kraków are detained afterwards to prevent a similar uprising, the Kraków Uprising, that was planned but never carried out.

1945 – World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.

1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.

1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.

1997 – Korean Air Flight 801 crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam killing 228 of 254 people on board.

2011 – War in Afghanistan: A United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, 7 Afghan soldiers, and 1 Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan.

2012 – NASA's Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1809 – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English poet (d. 1892)

1908 – Helen Jacobs, American tennis player and commander (d. 1997)

1928 – Andy Warhol, American painter and photographer (d. 1987)

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.