Today in History December 2

1697 – St Paul’s Cathedral opens in London
1804 – Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned emperor of France in Paris
1816 – First savings bank in US opens (Philadelphia Savings Fund Society)
1845 – Manifest Destiny: President James K. Polk announces to Congress that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.
1867 – In a New York City theater, British author Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States.
1901 – Gillette patents first disposable razor
1939 – La Guardia Airport began operations as an airliner from Chicago lands, 1 minute after midnight
1941 – Yamamoto sends his fleet to Pearl Harbor
1942 – First controlled nuclear chain reaction (Enrico Fermi-U of Chicago)
1952 – First human birth televised to public (KOA-TV Denver, Colo)
1954 – US Senate censures Joe McCarthy (Sen-R-Wisc) for “conduct that tends to bring Senate into dishonor & disrepute”

1961 – Fidel Castro declares he’s a Marxist, and will lead Cuba to Communism

1968 – Richard Nixon names Henry Kissinger security advisor

1969 – Boeing 747 jumbo jet first public preview (Seattle to NYC)
1970 – Environmental Protection Agency begins (Dir: William Ruckelshaus)
1974 – Soyuz 16 launched into Earth orbit for 6 days
1980 – 4 American Maryknoll nuns killed by death squads in El Salvador
1982 – First permanent artificial heart successfully implanted (U of Utah) in retired dentist Barney Clark; lived 112 days with Jarvic-7 heart
1986 – Dow-Jones index hits record 1,955.57
1990 – First time 12 people in space
1993 – Dow-Jones hits record 3702.11
2001 – Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
2012 – Pier Luigi Bersani is elected Italian Prime Minister