December 2 ...

In 1804 Napoleon was crowned emperor of France. In 1823 President James Monroe outlined the doctrine opposing European expansion in the Western Hemisphere in his seventh annual State of the Union address to Congress. Though it was mostly conceived by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, it became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1859 militant abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harper's Ferry the previous October. In 1939 New York's La Guardia Airport began operations as an airliner from Chicago landed at one minute past midnight. In 1942 a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated for the first time by Dr. Enrico Fermi and his staff at the University of Chicago. In 1954 the Senate voted to condemn Wisconsin Republican Joseph R. McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency began operating under director William Ruckelshaus. In 1971 Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujairah, Sharjah, Dubai, and Umm Al Quwain form the United Arab Emirates. In 1980 four American churchwomen were raped, murdered, and buried outside San Salvador. (Five Salvadoran guardsmen were convicted in the killings.) In 1982 in the first operation of its kind, doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center implanted a permanent artificial heart in the chest of retired dentist Dr. Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the device. In 1993 the space shuttle Endeavor blasted off on a mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope; also on this day, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot to death by security forces in Medellin. In 1995 NASA launched a US-European observatory on a $1 billion mission to study the sun. In 2001 in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in US history, Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection.