D-Day: Allies storm Normandy’s coast

In Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, President Andrew Jackson boards a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad train for a pleasure trip to Baltimore. Jackson, who had never been on a train before, was the first president to take a ride on the "Iron Horse," as locomotives were known then.

On June 6, 1856, the fifth and final day of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Franklin Pierce becomes the first elected president of the United States not to be nominated by his party for a second term. Instead, the party chooses James Buchanan, who will go on to win the presidency in November.

William Quantrill, the man who gave Frank and Jesse James their first education in killing, dies from wounds sustained in a skirmish with Union soldiers in Kentucky.

On June 6, 1889, a fire ignites in a Seattle woodworking shop and sweeps through some 100 acres, destroying much of the city’s business district and waterfront. The Great Seattle Fire culminates in losses estimated at $20 million—and serves as a turning point in the city’s history.

The first large-scale battle fought by American soldiers in World War I begins in Belleau Wood, northwest of the Paris-to-Metz road.

On June 6, 1933, eager motorists park their automobiles on the grounds of Camden Drive-In, the first-ever drive-in movie theater, located on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Pennsauken, New Jersey.

A U.S. Navy jet flying low-altitude target reconnaissance missions over Laos is shot down by communist Pathet Lao ground fire. Less than 48 hours later, a second jet, which was escorting an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft, is also shot down.

James H. Meredith, who in 1962 became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, is shot by a sniper shortly after beginning a lone civil rights march through the South. Known as the “March Against Fear,” Meredith had been walking from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in an attempt to encourage voter registration by African Americans in the South.

Twenty-three years after its 1948 premiere, "The Ed Sullivan Show" has its final broadcast on June 6, 1971.

More than 500 passengers are killed when their train plunges into the Bagmati River in India on June 6, 1981. The rail accident—the worst in India to that date—was believed to have been caused when an engineer tried to avoid striking a cow.

In a bloody climax to two years of fighting between the Indian government and Sikh separatists, Indian army troops fight their way into the besieged Golden Temple compound in Amritsar–the holiest shrine of Sikhism–and kill at least 500 Sikh rebels. More than 100 Indian soldiers and scores of nonbelligerent Sikhs also perished in the ferocious gun and artillery battle, which was launched in the early morning hours of June 6. (Sikh groups dispute this figure and say thousands died, including a large number of pilgrims who were there for an important Sikh festival). The army also attacked Sikh guerrillas besieged in three dozen other temples and religious shrines throughout the state of Punjab. Indian officials hailed the operation as a success and said it “broke the back” of the Sikh terrorist movement.

Eighteen-year-old Melissa Drexler gives birth to a baby boy in the bathroom stall at an Aberdeen Township banquet hall in New Jersey during her high school prom. Maintenance workers called to clean up blood found in the stall discover a bag in the garbage with her dead baby inside. An autopsy later revealed that the baby had been born alive but had been strangled to death.

On June 6, 1998, the cable network HBO airs the pilot episode of "Sex and the City," a new comedy series chronicling the lives and loves of four women living in New York City.