402        Apr 6, Battle at Pollentia: Roman army under Stilicho beat the Visigoths.

1252        Apr 6, Peter of Verona (45), [Peter Martyr], Italian inquisitor died.

1483        Apr 6, Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, d.1520), Dutch painter (Sistine Madonna), was born to an unremarkable painter in the Duchy of Urbino. He went on to paint works in the Vatican. After an apprenticeship in Perugia, he went to Florence, having heard of the work da Vinci and Michelangelo were doing. His last 12 years were spent on numerous commissions in Rome. He died on his 37th birthday, his funeral mass being celebrated in the Vatican.

1593        Apr 6, John Greenwood, English Congressionalist, was hanged.

1829        Apr 6, Niels Henrik Abel (b.1802), Norwegian mathematician, died of tuberculosis. After him comes the term Abelian group, an algebraic commutative group. In 2004 Peter Pesic authored “Abel’s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability.”

1886        Apr 6, The City of Vancouver, Canada, was incorporated. The ceremony was delayed when it was discovered no one had thought to bring paper on which to write down the details. The ceremony was held in Jonathan Miller’s house. The population of the city was about 1,000.

1965        Apr 6, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the use of ground troops in combat operations.

1973        Apr 6, Yankee Ron Blomberg (b.1948) became the 1st designated hitter. He walked.

1985        Apr 6, William J. Schroeder became the first artificial heart recipient to be discharged from the hospital as he moved into an apartment in Louisville, Ky.

1992        Apr 6, In Peru journalist Gustavo Gorriti was kidnapped hours after Fujimori seized dictatorial powers, announcing over television that he was closing Congress because it was sabotaging his war against the rebels. Gorriti was released the next day after an intense campaign by international journalist associations and human rights groups for his freedom. Pres. Fujimori closed Congress and the judiciary and ruled by decree for the rest of the year.

1994        Apr 6, Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun announced his retirement after 24 years. Two months before his retirement he declared his opposition to capital punishment because the system was fraught with discrimination and mistakes. He stepped aside to allow Pres. Clinton to appoint his replacement. In 1999 David N. Atkinson published “Leaving the Bench,” a historical look At the conditions under which Supreme Court justices retire.

1997        Apr 6, Jack Kent Cooke (84), owner of the Washington Redskins, died. Settlement of his will took 7 years and cost $64 million in professional fees.

1998        Apr 6, Pres. Clinton announced a ban on imports of 58 types of military-style assault weapons.

1999        Apr 6, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji began a 9-day, 6-city US visit in Los Angeles. He planned to gain support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

2000        Apr 6, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, the father of Elian Gonzalez, arrived in Washington DC with his wife and baby son to press his case for the return of his son from relatives in Miami.

2002        Apr 6, Pres. Bush repeated his call for Israel to “withdraw without delay” from West Bank towns it had occupied since launching an offensive after a string of suicide attacks. Bush also demanded the Palestinians call “an immediate and effective cease-fire.”

2003        Apr 6, In Capetown, SA, Roxanne Dickson (5) became the 7th child to die from gang violence in the last month. Some 280 gangs operated in Western Cape, a province of about 3 million people, 5 percent of whom are believed to belong to gangs.

2005        Apr 6, Prince Rainier III (b.1923) of Monaco died at age 81, nearly a month after he was hospitalized with a lung infection. His fairy-tale marriage to Hollywood star Grace Kelly brought elegance and glamour to one of Europe’s oldest dynasties.

2008        Apr 6, Montenegrins voted in the tiny Balkan state’s first presidential election since it split from Serbia two years ago. President Filip Vujanovic won re-election by a landslide, cementing Montenegro’s westward economic and political course since breaking away from Serbia two years ago.

2008        Apr 6, In Russia President George W. Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin ended their last face-to-face meeting as heads of state with warm words for each other but no solution to their row over missile defense.

2010        Apr 6, Nigeria’s Acting President Goodluck Jonathan installed his new cabinet, appointing senior Goldman Sachs executive Olusegun Aganga as his new finance minister. Jonathan also named former mines minister Deziani Allison-Madueke and Godsday Orubebe as the new oil and Niger Delta ministers. Police said that religious massacres have stopped, but “secret” killings of Christians and Muslims continue on a smaller scale across central Nigeria, claiming more than 30 lives this year.

2010        Apr 6, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said the new US-Russian arms control treaty is a much better deal for Russia than its predecessor, but Moscow reserves the right to withdraw from it if a planned US missile defense system grows into a threat.

2010        Apr 6, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon criticized as “unacceptable” Uzbekistan’s placing of land mines along parts of its border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that have not been delineated.

2013        Apr 6, Lebanon’s President Michel Suleiman asked Tammam Salam (68) to form a new Cabinet. The Beirut legislator and former culture minister was chosen for the job by 124 members of the 128-seat parliament.

2014        Apr 6, Hungary held elections. PM Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won the parliamentary elections by a wide margin, with a left-wing coalition and the far-right Jobbik party in second place. An official projection gave Orban’s Fidesz party 133 of 199 parliament seats, guaranteeing it will form the next government.