As related in a letter dated the following day, General George Washington writes to Congress from his headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey, to report that he had transported much of the Continental Army’s stores and baggage across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania on December 2, 1776. His famous crossing of the Delaware would come less than one month later.

In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Napoleon I, the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old conqueror of Europe placed on his own head.

Militant abolitionist John Brown is executed on charges of treason, murder and insurrection on December 2, 1859.

Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist, directs and controls the first nuclear chain reaction in his laboratory beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, ushering in the nuclear age. Upon successful completion of the experiment, a coded message was transmitted to President Roosevelt: “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”

On December 2, 1970, a new federal agency opens its doors. Created in response to the dawning realization that human activity can have major effects on the planet, the Environmental Protection Agency heralded a new age of government action on behalf of the environment.

On December 2, 1972, the Temptations earn the last of their four chart-topping hits when “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” reaches #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Opening testimony takes place in the highly publicized rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Jean Kennedy Smith, the president’s sister and a former ambassador to Ireland. Smith, then a 30-year-old medical student at Georgetown University, was accused of sexually assaulting a 29-year-old Florida woman in the early hours of March 30, 1991, at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach compound.

On December 2, 1999, in the journal Nature, scientists announce that they have sequenced the DNA of a human chromosome for the first time. The genetic sequence of chromosome 22 is one of the first major findings of the Human Genome Project, an international scientific effort to decode the instructions for life hidden in our cells.

On December 2, 2006, four students at the University of California, Berkeley, inhabit the treetops of an oak grove on campus to protest the university’s plans to demolish over an acre of the forest to build a new athletic center, kicking off an epic 21-month standoff. It was one of the longest tree sit-ins in history.