Napoleon crowned emperor

As related in a letter dated the following day, General George Washington writes to Congress from his headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey, to report that he had transported much of the Continental Army’s stores and baggage across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania on December 2, 1776. His famous crossing of the Delaware would come less […]

During his annual address to Congress, President James Monroe proclaims a new U.S. foreign policy initiative that becomes known as the “Monroe Doctrine.” Primarily the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine forbade European interference in the American hemisphere but also asserted U.S. neutrality in regard to future European conflicts. The […]

Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist, directs and controls the first nuclear chain reaction in his laboratory beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, ushering in the nuclear age. Upon successful completion of the experiment, a coded message was transmitted to President Roosevelt: “The Italian navigator has landed in the […]

Following a year of severely strained relations between the United States and Cuba, Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist. The announcement sealed the bitter Cold War animosity between the two nations. Castro came to power in 1959 after leading a successful revolution against the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista. Almost […]

On December 2, 1971, the United Arab Emirates is formed. The union of six small Gulf kingdoms—to which a seventh was soon added—created a small state with an outsized role in the global economy. A number of kingdoms on the norther coast of the Arabian Peninsula came under British protection through a series of treaties […]

Opening testimony takes place in the highly publicized rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Jean Kennedy Smith, the president’s sister and a former ambassador to Ireland. Smith, then a 30-year-old medical student at Georgetown University, was accused of sexually assaulting a 29-year-old Florida woman in […]

On December 2, 1999, in the journal Nature, scientists announce that they have sequenced the DNA of a human chromosome for the first time. The genetic sequence of chromosome 22 is one of the first major findings of the Human Genome Project, an international scientific effort to decode the instructions for life hidden in our […]

On December 2, 2006, four students at the University of California, Berkeley, inhabit the treetops of an oak grove on campus to protest the university’s plans to demolish over an acre of the forest to build a new athletic center, kicking off an epic 21-month standoff. It was one of the longest tree sit-ins in […]