Reuters historical calendar - January 6

London, Jan 5 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 6 since 1900: 1919 - Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US president (1901-1909), died.

An expansionist politician, he acquired the Panama Canal Zone in 1903. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1912.

1929 - King Alexander of Yugoslavia abolished the constitution, dissolved the government and established a royal dictatorship.

1978 - The United States handed back the Holy Crown of St Stephen to then-communist Hungary after holding it since World War Two.

1992 - President Zviad Gamsakhurdia fled Georgia after a bloody two-week power struggle, leaving his parliament burning and in the hands of jubilant rebel gunmen.

1993 - Dizzy Gillespie, US jazz trumpeter, died. He was one of the founding fathers of the 1940s revolutionary style known as bop.

1993 - Rudolf Nureyev, Russian ballet dancer, died at 54. One of the greatest dancers of the century, he was granted political asylum in Paris in 1961.

1995 - Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian-born anti-apartheid fighter who became housing minister in South Africa's first democratic government, died of cancer; he was 68.

1999 - Former Lesotho prime minister Ntsu Mokhehle died after a long illness aged 80.

2002 - Argentina's President Eduardo Duhalde cut loose a fixed currency peg and devalued the peso by nearly 30 percent against the U.S. dollar in a bid to reverse a recession.

2003 - Jean-Claude Trichet, the head of the Bank of France, went on trial for complicity in an alleged cover-up of losses when Credit Lyonnais came close to collapse.

2005 - South Africa's Nelson Mandela announced that his son, Makgatho, had died of AIDS, challenging the taboo that keeps many Africans from discussing the epidemic.

**2006 - Lou Rawls, the pioneering crossover artist known for signature hits like ''You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,'' and ''Lady Love'', died aged 72.

REUTERS MQA RAI1103