December 2 in History

December 2 is one of those dates which almost leads me to reconsider astrology as an explanatory system, what with all the crucial events which have occurred today.

1823: President James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine, by which the W.S. pledged not to interfere in European affairs but reserved the whole Western Hemisphere as an American zone of influence.

1954: The U.S. Senate censured Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for misconduct in his spurious investigations of alleged communists in the United States.

1942: A team of scientists under Enrico Fermi generated the world's first controlled, self-sustaining atomic chain reaction in a makeshift lab under the stadium at the University of Chicago.

1859: Abolitionist John Brown was hanged for having led the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which he hoped would inspire a slave uprising.

1804: In the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France, punctuating the the end of the French Revolution and all but ensuring a decade's more conflict in Europe.

(It's fascinating that each of these events has either a parallel or a latter-day outcome in our present time, from American imperialism and global nuclear proliferation to rabid Christian fundamentalism and outrageous excesses by the powerful. Not to mention updated McCarthyism.)