What Happened on June 2nd in History
30 historical events on this date
Napoleonic Wars: A Franco-Spanish fleet recaptures from the British the island of Diamond Rock, which guards the entrance to the bay leading to Fort-de-France, Martinique.
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a global series of conflicts fought by a fluctuating array of European coalitions against the French First Republic (1803–1804) under the First Consul followed...
The Slavic Congress opens in Prague.
The Prague Slavic Congress of 1848 took place in Prague, Austrian Empire between 2 June and 12 June 1848. It was the first occasion on which representatives from nearly all Slav populations of...
The Fenians defeat Canadian forces at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, but the raids end soon after.
The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish republican organisation founded in the United States in 1858 by John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny. It was a precursor to Clan na Gael, a sister organisation to the...
Nobiling assassination attempt by anarchist Karl Nobiling targeting the German Kaiser, Wilhelm I.
The Nobiling assassination attempt, or the assassination attempt on Wilhelm I of 2 June 1878, was an armed attack carried out by Karl Nobiling, a German anarchist philosopher, against the Kaiser...
Guglielmo Marconi applies for a patent for his wireless telegraph.
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquess was an Italian radio-frequency engineer, inventor, and politician known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system....
Alfred Deakin becomes Prime Minister of Australia for the third time.
Alfred Deakin was an Australian politician who served as the second prime minister of Australia from 1903 to 1904, 1905 to 1908, and 1909 to 1910. He held office as the leader of the Protectionist...
Charles Rolls, a co-founder of Rolls-Royce Limited, becomes the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane.
Charles Stewart Rolls was a British motoring and aviation pioneer. With Henry Royce, he co-founded the Rolls-Royce car manufacturing firm. He was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical...
Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate U.S. cities.
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism...
U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from Massachusetts, he had served as the 29th vice president from 1921 to 1923, under...
World War II: German paratroopers murder Greek civilians in the villages of Kondomari and Alikianos.
World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major...
Birth of the Italian Republic: In a referendum, Italians vote to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After the referendum, King Umberto II of Italy is exiled.
An institutional referendum was held by universal suffrage in the Kingdom of Italy on 2 June 1946, a key event of contemporary Italian history. Until 1946, Italy was a kingdom ruled by the House of...
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey becomes the first British coronation, and one of the first major international events, to be televised.
The coronation of Elizabeth II as queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms took place on 2 June 1953 at Westminster Abbey in London. Elizabeth acceded to the throne at the age...
The USSR and Yugoslavia sign the Belgrade declaration and thus normalize relations between the two countries, discontinued since 1948.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until its dissolution in 1991. It was the world's...
Aeronaves de México Flight 111 crashes on approach to Guadalajara International Airport, killing 45.
Aeroméxico Flight 111 was a scheduled commercial flight from Tijuana to Acapulco with stopovers in Mazatlán, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. On June 2, 1958, the Lockheed L-749 Constellation was...
During the FIFA World Cup, police intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
The 1962 FIFA World Cup was the seventh edition of the FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international football championship for senior men's national teams. It was held from 30 May to 17 June 1962 in...
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is formed.
The Palestine Liberation Organization is a Palestinian nationalist coalition that is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian...
Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.
The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from June 1966 through January 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of...
Luis Monge is executed in Colorado's gas chamber, in the last pre-Furman execution in the United States.
Luis José Monge was a convicted mass murderer who was executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary in 1967. Monge was the last inmate to be executed before an unofficial moratorium on...
Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran are brutally suppressed, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group 2 June Movement.
West Berlin was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any...
Pope John Paul II starts his first official visit to his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country.
Pope John Paul II was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 16 October 1978 until his death in 2005. He was the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in the 16th century,...
After an emergency landing because of an in-flight fire, twenty-three passengers aboard Air Canada Flight 797 are killed when a flashover occurs as the plane's doors open. Because of this incident, numerous new safety regulations are put in place.
Air Canada Flight 797 was an international passenger flight operating from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to Montréal–Dorval International Airport, with an intermediate stop at Toronto...
The Lower Ohio Valley tornado outbreak spawns 66 confirmed tornadoes in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, killing 12.
The June 1990 Lower Ohio Valley tornado outbreak spawned 65 tornadoes, including seven of F4 intensity, in southern Illinois, central and southern Indiana, southwestern Ohio, and northern Kentucky...
In Denver, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 11 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. He was executed four years later.
Denver is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Officially a consolidated city and county, it is located in the South Platte River valley on the western edge of the High...
Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-91, the final mission of the Shuttle-Mir program.
Space Shuttle Discovery is a retired American Space Shuttle orbiter. The spaceplane was one of the orbiters from NASA's Space Shuttle program and the third of five fully operational orbiters to be...
Europe launches its first voyage to another planet, Mars. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe launches from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", for its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous atmosphere that is primarily carbon...
Twelve people are killed and eleven others injured in a spree shooting in Cumbria, England, before the perpetrator takes his own life.
The Cumbria shootings were a spree shooting and mass shooting that occurred on 2 June 2010 when a lone gunman, taxi driver Derrick Bird, killed twelve people and injured eleven others in Cumbria,...
Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killing of demonstrators during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the head of state of Egypt. Under the various iterations of the Constitution of Egypt following the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the president is also...
Telangana officially becomes the 29th state of India, formed from ten districts of northwestern Andhra Pradesh.
Telangana is a state in southern India on the Deccan Plateau bordering Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh to the north and Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to the south. It is the eleventh largest and the...
Following a request from Ankara, the United Nations officially changes the name of the Republic of Turkey in the organization from what was previously known as "Turkey" to "Türkiye".
Ankara is the capital city of Turkey. Located in the central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of over 5.3 million residents in its urban center, out of 6 million residents in Ankara...
A collision between two passenger trains and a parked freight train near the city of Balasor, Odisha in eastern India, results in 296 deaths and more than 1,200 people injured.
On 2 June 2023, three trains collided in Balasore district in the east Indian state of Odisha. The crash occurred around 19:00 IST when Coromandel Express, a passenger train, collided with a...