Thirty-year-old British Major John Andre is hanged as a spy by U.S. military forces in Tappan, New York, on October 2, 1780.

President Woodrow Wilson, who had just cut short a tour of the country to promote the formation of the League of Nations, suffers a stroke on October 2, 1919.

On October 2, 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. “[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients…sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to ‘them shells’ and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact.”

The Warsaw Uprising ends on October 2, 1944, with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces.

On October 2, 1965, during a football game between the University of Florida Gators and the Louisiana State University Tigers, UF players test a newly concocted sports drink to help them regain the essential chemicals their bodies lose from profuse sweating. Developed in their own school's science labs, the drink is designed to fight dehydration, rebalance their bodies' electrolytes and restore blood sugar, potassium and body salts so they can continue to perform at a high level through their games. The Gators go on to win the match, after the heavily favored Tigers wilt in Florida's muggy, 102-degree heat.

On October 2, 1985, actor Rock Hudson, 59, becomes the first major U.S. celebrity to die of complications from AIDS. Hudson’s death raised public awareness of the epidemic, which until that time had been ignored by many in the mainstream as a “gay plague.”

On October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts enters the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where he fatally shoots five female students and wounds five more before turning his gun on himself and dying by suicide.