TODAY IN HISTORY ― MARCH 6

March 6 is the 65th day of the year (66th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 300 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Wednesday or Thursday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Saturday (56).  

NATIONAL OREO COOKIE DAY  

12 BC – The Roman Emperor Augustus is named Pontifex Maximus, incorporating the position into that of the Emperor.

845 – Execution of the 42 orthodox Martyrs of Amorium at Samarra (present day Iraq).

1204 – The Siege of Château Gaillard ends in a French victory over King John of England, who loses control of Normandy to King Philip II Augustus.  

1454 – The Thirteen Years' War: Delegates of the Prussian Confederation pledge allegiance to King Casimir IV of Poland who agrees to commit his forces in aiding the Confederation's struggle for independence from the Teutonic Knights.

1788 – The First Fleet arrives at Norfolk Island in order to found a convict settlement.

1836 – The Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo – After a thirteen-day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured.

1857 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.

1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.

1899 – Bayer A.G. registers "Aspirin" as a trademark.

1930 – International Unemployment Day demonstrations globally initiated by the communist International Comintern.

1945 – World War II: Cologne, Germany is captured by American troops.

1951 – The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins. The Rosenbergs were American citizens who spied for the Soviet Union and were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, and passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Although the Left in the U.S. believed them to be innocent for decades, when the Soviet Union fell and state documents were made available, they were discovered to have been guilty all along.

1964 – Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad officially gives boxing champion Cassius Clay the name Muhammad Ali. 

1967 – Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defects to the United States.

1970 – An explosion at the Weather Underground safe house in Greenwich Village kills three.

1975 – For the first time the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown in motion to a national TV audience by Robert J. Groden and Dick Gregory.

 

1981 – After 19 years of presenting the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signs off for the last time. Cronkite was famous for his delivery of the death of President John F. Kennedy on National TV as well as for his editorial comment that, after the Tet offensive, the Vietnam war was "no longer winnable" for the United States.

1987 – The British ferry MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes in about 90 seconds killing 193.

1988 – Three Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers are killed by Special Air Service on the territory of Gibraltar in the conclusion of Operation Flavius.

1990 – Ed Yielding and Joseph T. Vida set the transcontinental speed record flying an SR-71 Blackbird from Los Angeles to Virginia in 64 minutes, averaging 2,124 mph.

2008 – A suicide bomber kills 68 people (including first responders) in Baghdad on the same day that a gunman kills eight students in Jerusalem.


BORN TODAY

1475 – Michelangelo, Italian painter and sculptor (d. 1564)

1619 – Cyrano de Bergerac, French author and playwright (d. 1655)

1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English-Italian poet and translator (d. 1861)

1927 – Gordon Cooper, American engineer, pilot, and astronaut (d. 2004)

1939 – Adam Osborne, Thai-Indian engineer and businessman, founded the Osborne Computer Corporation (d. 2003)

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