Hollywood icon Rock Hudson dies of AIDS

Thirty-year-old British Major John Andre is hanged as a spy by U.S. military forces in Tappan, New York, on October 2, 1780. Andre, an accomplice of Benedict Arnold, had been captured by Patriots John Paulding, David Williams and Isaac Van Wart on September 23 after they found incriminating papers in his boot. The papers revealed […]

President Woodrow Wilson, who had just cut short a tour of the country to promote the formation of the League of Nations, suffers a stroke on October 2, 1919. The tour’s intense schedule—8,000 miles in 22 days—cost Wilson his health. He suffered constant headaches during the tour, finally collapsing from exhaustion in Pueblo, Colorado, in late […]

On October 2, 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. “[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces […]

The former French colony of Guinea declares its independence on October 2, 1958, with Sekou Toure as the new nation’s first leader. Guinea was the sole French West African colony to opt for complete independence, rather than membership in the French Community, and soon thereafter France withdrew all aid to the new republic. It soon […]

Chief Justice Earl Warren swears in Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and ’50s, Marshall was the architect and executor of the legal strategy that ended the era of official racial segregation. The […]

Amid a resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump announces that he and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for COVID-19 in an early-morning tweet on October 2, 2020.  Coming a week after a White House gathering celebrating his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and 48 hours after his […]