06 August History
- 1497 - John Cabot returns to England after his first successful journey to the Labrador coast.
- 1863 - The CSS Alabama captures the USS Sea Bride near the Cape of Good Hope.
- 1888 - Martha Turner is murdered by an unknown assailant, believed to be Jack the Ripper, in London, England.
- 1890 - William Kemmler becomes the first man to be executed by the electric chair.
- 1904 - The Japanese army in Korea surrounds a Russian army retreating to Manchuria.
- 1914 - Ellen Louise Wilson, the first wife of the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, dies of Barite's disease.
- 1927 - A Massachusetts high court hears the final plea from Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians convicted of murder.
- 1942 - The Soviet city of Voronezh falls to the German army.
- 1945 - Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.It was the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, that induced the Japanese to surrender.
- 1965 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing the literacy test for voting eligibility in the South.
06 August Birthdays
- 1809 - Alfred Lord Tennyson, English poet laureate (1850), wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade."
- 1881 - Alexander Flemming, Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin in 1928.
- 1889 - Major General George Kenney, commander of the U.S. Fifth Air Force in New Guinea and the Solomons during World War II.
- 1911 - Lucille Ball, American actress and comedian.
- 1916 - Richard Hofstadter, historian who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work
- 1927 - Andy Warhol, American pop artist.