August 6

• August 6, 258
  Pope Sixtus II, bishop of Rome, is beheaded upon orders of Emperor Valerian
• August 6, 1517
  Francysk Skaryna, a Belarusian humanist and one of the first book printers in Eastern Europe, releases in Prague The Psalter, his first edition in the Old Belarusian language
• August 6, 1753
  Georg Richmann, German physicist, dies of electrocution in St. Petersburg, Russia, during an attempt to duplicate Benjamin Franklin's "sentry box" experiment becoming the first person in history to die while conducting electrical experiments
• August 6, 1774
  Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker Movement, arrives in New York
• August 6, 1806
  The Holy Roman Empire goes out of existence after the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II abdicates as a consequence of the Treaty of Pressburg and reorganizing Germany under a Napoleon
• August 6, 1825
  Bolivia gains independence from Peru with Latin America political leader Simón Bolívar as the first president after 15 years of war
• August 6, 1870
  Prussia beat France in the Battle of Spicheren
• August 6, 1888
  Martha Tabram, an English prostitute, is murdered by an unknown assailant, believed to be Jack the Ripper, a serial killer, who murdered from 5 to 11 women between August and November in London's Whitechapel district
• August 6, 1890
  Convicted murderer William Kemmler, senteced to death at Auburn State Prison in New York for murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe, becomes the first person to be executed in the electric chair
• August 6, 1926
  Warner Bros premieres Vitaphone sound-on-disc movie system in New York, Don Juan with John Barrymore shown
• August 6, 1945
  American airmen drop atomic bomb, developed by the Manhattan Project, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing from 90,000 to 166,000 people, which becomes together with bomb dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki, the only use of nuclear weapons in war
• August 6, 1962
  Jamaica gains independence from Britain
• August 6, 1978
  Pope Paul VI dies at age 80 of heart attack at summer residence in Castelgandolfo
• August 6, 1990
  United Nations Security Council votes 13-0 to place economic sanctions against Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait
• August 6, 1996
  NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, found in Allan Hills, Antarctica, and thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms