October 6 is the anniversary of a curse on a sports team, the execution of martyrs, a great fire, and the debut of the first "talkie."
105 BC. In the Battle of Arausio, the Cimbri inflict the heaviest defeat on the Roman army of Gnaeus Mallius Maximus.
Ranged against the migratory tribes of the Cimbri under Boiorix and the Teutoni were two Roman armies, commanded by the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio and consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. However, bitter differences between the commanders prevented the Roman armies from cooperating, with devastating results. Roman losses are quoted at up to 80,000 troops, as well as servants and camp followers. In terms of human lives lost, Arausio is among the most lethal battles in world history and the biggest Roman defeat.
69 BC. In the Battle of Tigranocerta, the forces of the Roman Republic led by Consul Lucius Licinius Lucullus defeat the army of the Kingdom of Armenia led by King Tigranes the Great. His capital city of Tigranocerta was lost to Rome as a result.
68 BC. In the Battle of Artaxata, Lucullus again defeats Tigranes the Great of Armenia. Though the Romans were again victorious, the long years the army had spent campaigning and a perceived lack of booty among the Roman Legionaries led to a mutiny of the army. They refused to march any further but agreed to defend key positions from attack. Lucullus was then replaced by the Roman Senate as commander of the army by Pompey the Great.
404. Byzantine Empress Eudoxia has her seventh and last pregnancy who ends in a miscarriage. She is left bleeding and dies of an infection shortly afterwards.
1582. Due to the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, this day is skipped in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
1600. Jacopo Peri's
Euridice, the earliest surviving opera, premieres in Florence, signifying the beginning of the Baroque Period.
1683. William Penn brings 13 German immigrant families to the colony of Pennsylvania, marking the first German people to immigrate to America. By the time of the American Revolution, there were 100,000 Germans in Pennsylvania, a third of the total population at the time.
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.
American Brigadier General George Clinton and his brother, Brigadier General James Clinton, were faced with defending Fort Montgomery and Fort Clinton with a combined military force of approximately 700 men. Outnumbered by the British 3-1, the American force put up a courageous defense of both forts.
Despite the loss of both forts and an overwhelming number of troops, though, the Americans were able to delay the British long enough that they were unable to aid Cornwallis at the Battle of Saratoga. The decisive American victory at Saratoga persuaded King Louis XVI of France that the Patriots were worthy of his support -- assistance that eventually helped the Americans win the war.
1789. In the French Revolution, Louis XVI returns to Paris from Versailles after being confronted by the Parisian women on October 5.
1849. The 13 Martyrs of Arad are executed after the Hungarian war of independence. The 13 Martyrs of Arad were the thirteen Hungarian rebel generals who were executed in the city of Arad, in Transylvania (presently in Romania), after the Hungarian Revolution (1848-1849) was ended by troops of the Austrian Empire and Imperial Russia, who reestablished Habsburg rule over the area. The execution was ordered by the Austrian general, Julius Freiherr von Haynau.
1854. The Great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead starts shortly after midnight. The Great Fire was a tragic and spectacular series of events starting on Friday October 6, 1854, in which a substantial amount of property in the two North East of England towns was destroyed in a series of fires and an explosion which killed 53 and injured hundreds.
The force of the explosion was immense, and heavy debris was thrown as much as three quarters of a mile from the seat of the explosion. Huge granite blocks forming the tramway for carts outside the warehouse were flung over the church for two and three hundred yards into neighboring streets and buildings.
1863. Confederate guerilla leader William Clarke Quantrill continues his bloody rampage through Kansas when he attacks Baxter Springs. Although he failed to capture the stronghold, his men massacred a Union detachment that happened to be traveling nearby.
Some of the bloodiest chapters of the American Civil War were written in Kansas and Missouri, where irregular combatants fought. In August 1863, Quantrill and 450 Confederate partisans sacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas. They murdered 150 men and set the town on fire before escaping the pursuing Union cavalry. After destroying Lawrence, Quantrill and his men noticed that the area around northwestern Missouri and northeastern Kansas was becoming more crowded with Yankee troops. Quantrill started to drift south, intent on wintering within the friendly confines of Confederate Texas.
On October 6, Quantrill and his men happened upon a Federal post at Baxter Springs, near the Missouri and Indiana Territory borders. Defending the post were parts of the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry and the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry. Quantrill attacked suddenly, surprising the Yankees, who suffered heavy casualties before barricading themselves inside the earth-and-timber fortress. While Quantrill's men debated the merits of another attack on the post, another Union force appeared from the north. It was General James G. Blunt, commander of the forces in Kansas, who was in the process of moving his headquarters from Fort Scott, Kansas, to Fort Smith, Arkansas. Blunt spotted Quantrill's men but mistook them for Union troops because many were dressed in captured Yankee uniforms. Many of Blunt's 100 men were clerks and office staffers. Quantrill attacked, and the scene turned into a massacre. The Yankees quickly scattered, and Quantrill's partisans hunted them down.
Seventy Union troops were killed, but Blunt escaped to the safety of Fort Smith. However, he was removed from command shortly thereafter. Quantrill and his men continued south to Texas, raiding homesteads and attacking Native American communities along the way.
1866. The Reno gang carries out the first robbery of a moving train in the U.S., making off with over $10,000 from an Ohio & Mississippi train in Jackson County, Indiana. Prior to this innovation in crime, holdups had taken place only on trains sitting at stations or freight yards.
This new method of sticking up moving trains in remote locations low on law enforcement soon became popular in the American West, where the recently constructed transcontinental and regional railroads made attractive targets. The sparsely populated landscape provided bandits with numerous isolated areas perfect for stopping trains, as well as plenty of places to hide from the law. Railroad owners eventually got wise and fought back, protecting their trains' valuables with large safes, armed guards and even specially fortified boxcars. Consequently, by the late 1800s, robbing trains had turned into an increasingly tough and dangerous job.
As for the Reno gang, which consisted of the four Reno brothers and their associates, their reign came to an end in 1868 when they all were finally captured after committing a series of train robberies and other criminal offenses. In December of that year, a mob stormed the Indiana jail where the bandits were being held and meted out vigilante justice, hanging brothers Frank, Simeon and William Reno (their brother John had been caught earlier and was already serving time in a different prison) and fellow gang member Charlie Anderson.
1889. Thomas Edison shows his first motion picture.
1908. Austria annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1910. Eleftherios Venizelos is elected Prime Minister of Greece for the first of seven times.
1926. On October 6, 1926, Yankee slugger Babe Ruth hits a record three homers against the St. Louis Cardinals in the fourth game of the World Series. The Yanks won the game 10-5, but despite Ruth’s unprecedented performance, they lost the championship in the seventh game. In 1928, in the fourth game of another Yanks-Cards World Series, Ruth tied his own record, knocking three more pitches out of the same park.
1927. The Jazz Singer opens; it is the first prominent talking movie.
The Jazz Singer is an American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era.
As conversion of theaters to sound was still in its early stages, the film played in a silent version in most of those venues outside the major cities that it reached in the first months of its run. The sound version was not released nationally until early the following year.
1939. The last Polish army is defeated in World War II.
1961. President John F. Kennedy, speaking on civil defense, advises American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Kennedy also assured the public that the U.S. civil defense program would soon begin providing such protection for every American. Only one year later, true to Kennedy's fears, the world hovered on the brink of full-scale nuclear war when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted over the USSR's placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the tense 13-day crisis, some Americans prepared for nuclear war by buying up canned goods and completing last-minute work on their backyard bomb shelters.
1966. LSD is declared illegal in the United States.
1973. Egypt launches a coordinated attack with Syria against Israel leading to the Yom Kippur War.
1976. New Premier Hua Guofeng orders the arrest of the Gang of Four and associates and ends the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China. The Gang of Four was the name given to a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes. The members consisted of Mao Zedong's last wife Jiang Qing, the leading figure of the group, and her close associates Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. The Gang of Four effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party of China through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.
The Gang of Four, together with disgraced Communist general Lin Biao, were labeled the two major "counter-revolutionary forces" of the Cultural Revolution and officially blamed by the Chinese government for the worst excesses of the societal chaos that ensued during the ten years of turmoil. Their downfall in a
coup d'état on October 6, 1976, a mere month after Mao's death, brought about major celebrations on the streets of Beijing and marked the end of a turbulent political era in China.
1979. Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit the White House.
1981. Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat is assassinated at a military review by Islamic extremists in the army. While passing the reviewing stand, soldiers opened fire, killing the president and other officials.
1985. PC Keith Blakelock is murdered as riots erupt in the Broadwater Farm suburb of London. The violence broke out after a black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home, and took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of the relationship between the police and local black communities.
Blakelock, who had joined the police five years earlier, had been assigned on the night of his death to a unit of 10 constables and a sergeant, who were dispatched to protect firefighters. When the officers were forced back by rioters, Blakelock stumbled and fell, and was surrounded by a mob of around 50 people. He received over 40 stabbing and cutting injuries, inflicted by machetes or similar, and the penetration of a six-inch-long knife into his neck. The murder remains unsolved.
1995. 51 Pegasi was discovered to be the first major star apart from the Sun to have a planet orbiting around it.
2002. Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá is canonized.
2007. Jason Lewis completes the first human-powered circumnavigation of the globe. All told, it took 13 years of hiking, biking, and paddling. Lewis had estimated it would take two and a half years but he was delayed by things like a crocodile attack in Africa.
2011. South Korea rejects North Korea's demands that two citizens from the north who crossed the border be repatriated.
Elsewhere, Tropical Storm Jova forms off the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the trial of Ichirō Ozawa, a powerful faction leader in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, over a political funding scandal begins today in Japan.