THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― OCTOBER 6

October 6 is the 279th day of the year(280th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 86 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).

NATIONAL MAD HATTER DAY  

1683 – Encouraged by William Penn's offer of 5,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania and the freedom to practice their religion, the first Mennonites arrive in America aboard the Concord. They were among the first Germans to settle in the American colonies.

1777 – Sailing up the Hudson River to come to the aid of General Charles Cornwallis and the besieged British army at the Battle of Saratoga, General Henry Clinton and 3,000 British troops stop to launch an attack on Forts Clinton and Montgomery, in what is now Orange County, New York, in the early morning hours of October 6, 1777.

1866 – On this day in 1866, the brothers John and Simeon Reno commit the first train robbery in American history, making off with $13,000 from an Ohio and Mississippi railroad train in Jackson County, Indiana.

1908 – The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary announces its annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dual provinces in the Balkan region of Europe formerly under the control of the Ottoman Empire.


1912 – Pirates John Owen "Chief" Wilson hits a record 36th triple of the season. The record still stands and is the third oldest record in MLB.


1928 – Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek becomes president of China. In 1926, Chiang led the Northern Expedition to unify the country, becoming China's nominal leader. He served as Chairman of the National Military Council of the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 to 1948. Chiang led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War (the Chinese theater of World War II), consolidating power from the party's former regional warlords. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek was socially conservative, promoting traditional Chinese culture in the New Life Movement and rejecting western democracy and thenationalist democratic socialism that Sun embraced in favor of an authoritarian government.

1951 – Soviet Premier Josef Stalin (Isob Besorionis dze Jughshvili) proclaims the USSR has the hydrogen bomb.

1963 – President John F. Kennedy, speaking on civil defense, advises American families to build fallout shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. 


1966 – Partial meltdown at Detroit's Fermi 1 nuclear reactor; a loss-of-coolant accident. The plant is named after the Italian nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor as well as many other major contributions to nuclear physics. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.

1973 – The surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on Israel in October 1973 throws the Middle East into turmoil and threatens to bring the United States and the Soviet Union into direct conflict for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Shown, Israeli General Moyshe Dayan (with eye patch) and and future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

1978 – Hannah Holborn Gray is inaugurated as the first female head of a U.S. university (Chicago). Hanna Holborn was born in Heidelberg, Germany, the daughter of Hajo Holborn, a professor of European history at Yale who fled to America from Nazi Germany, and Annemarie Bettmann, a philologist.

1981 – Islamic terrorists assassinate Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, as he reviews troops on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Led by Khaled el Islambouli, a lieutenant in the Egyptian army with connections to the terrorist group Takfir Wal-Hajira, the terrorists, all wearing army uniforms, stopped in front of the reviewing stand and fired shots and threw grenades into a crowd of Egyptian government officials. Sadat, who was shot four times, died two hours later. Ten other people also died in the attack.

1995 – 51 Pegasi was discovered by Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz to be the first major star apart from the Sun to have a planet (an extrasolar planet) orbiting it.

2013 – At least 57 were killed and 393 injured across the country when anti-coup protesters and security forces clashed amid celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Mideast war with Israel. Pitched battles were fought for hours in some Cairo neighborhoods, where 48 of the 57 fatalities occurred. Residents reported areas of the city looked like combat zones, with tires burning and thick black smoke rising over the streets.


TODAY'S BIRTHS

1846 – George Westinghouse, American engineer and businessman, founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company(d. 1914)

1882 – Karol Szymanowski, Polish pianist and composer (d. 1937)

1931 – Riccardo Giacconi, Italian-American astrophysicist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.