Events on September 6 45
Year 394
Battle of the Frigidus: Roman Emperor Theodosius I defeats and kills Eugenius the usurper. His Frankish magister militum Arbogast escapes but commits suicide two days later.
Year 1492
Christopher Columbus sails from La Gomera in the Canary Islands, his final port of call before crossing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
Year 1522
The Victoria returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition and the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
Year 1620
The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England on the Mayflower to settle in North America. (Old Style date; September 16 per New Style date.)
Year 1634
Thirty Years' War: In the Battle of Nördlingen, the Catholic Imperial army defeats Swedish and German Protestant forces.
Year 1803
British scientist John Dalton begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.
Year 1847
Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
Year 1861
American Civil War: Forces under Union General Ulysses S. Grant bloodlessly capture Paducah, Kentucky, giving the Union control of the Tennessee River's mouth.
Year 1863
American Civil War: Confederate forces evacuate Battery Wagner and Morris Island in South Carolina.
Year 1870
Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyoming becomes the first woman in the United States to cast a vote legally after 1807.
Year 1885
Eastern Rumelia declares its union with Bulgaria, thus accomplishing Bulgarian unification.
Year 1901
Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed anarchist, shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
Year 1916
The first self-service grocery store Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee by Clarence Saunders.
Year 1930
Democratically elected Argentine president Hipólito Yrigoyen is deposed in a military coup.
Year 1939
World War II: Britain suffers its first fighter pilot casualty of the Second World War at the Battle of Barking Creek as a result of friendly fire.
Year 1943
The Monterrey Institute of Technology is founded in Monterrey, Mexico as one of the largest and most influential private universities in Latin America.
Year 1943
Pennsylvania Railroad's premier train derails at Frankford Junction in Philadelphia, killing 79 people and injuring 117 others.
Year 1946
United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes announces that the U.S. will follow a policy of economic reconstruction in postwar Germany.
Year 1949
Allied military authorities relinquish control of former Nazi Germany assets back to German control.
Year 1952
A prototype aircraft crashes at the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, England, killing 29 spectators and the two on board.
Year 1955
Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, and Armenian minorities are the target of a government-sponsored pogrom; dozens are killed in ensuing riots.
Year 1962
The United States government begins the Exercise Spade Fork nuclear readiness drill.
Year 1962
Archaeologist Peter Marsden discovers the first of the Blackfriars Ships dating back to the 2nd century AD in the Blackfriars area of the banks of the River Thames in London.
Year 1965
India retaliates following Pakistan's Operation Grand Slam which results in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 that ends in a stalemate and follows the signing of the Tashkent Declaration.
Year 1966
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is stabbed to death in Cape Town, South Africa during a parliamentary meeting.
Year 1970
Two passenger jets bound from Europe to New York are simultaneously hijacked by Palestinian terrorist members of the PFLP and taken to Dawson's Field, Jordan.
Year 1972
Munich massacre: Nine Israeli athletes die (along with a German policeman) at the hands of the Palestinian "Black September" terrorist group after being taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games. Two other Israeli athletes were slain in the initial attack the previous day.
Year 1976
Cold War: Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot Viktor Belenko lands a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 jet fighter at Hakodate in Japan and requests political asylum in the United States; his request is granted.
Year 1983
The Soviet Union admits to shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, stating that its operatives did not know that it was a civilian aircraft when it reportedly violated Soviet airspace.
Year 1986
In Istanbul, two terrorists from Abu Nidal's organization kill 22 and wound six congregants inside the Neve Shalom Synagogue during Shabbat services.
Year 1991
The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Year 1991
The name Saint Petersburg is restored to Russia's second largest city, which had been known as Leningrad since 1924.
Year 1995
Cal Ripken, Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking a record that had stood for 56 years.
Year 1997
The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales takes place in London. Well over a million people lined the streets and 2.5 billion watched around the world on television.
Year 2007
Israel executes the air strike Operation Orchard to destroy a nuclear reactor in Syria.
Year 2009
The ro-ro ferry SuperFerry 9 sinks off the Zamboanga Peninsula in the Philippines with 971 persons aboard; all but ten are rescued.
Year 2012
Sixty-one people die after a fishing boat capsizes off the İzmir Province coast of Turkey, near the Greek Aegean islands.