On June 2, 1946, Italian voters cast ballots in a national referendum to decide the country’s post-war form of government. The vote went decisively against the House of Savoy monarchy, and results announced three days later confirmed the establishment of the Italian Republic. The monarchy had been discredited by its association with the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the country’s defeat in World War II.
The same date in 1865 marked the effective end of the American Civil War when Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, commanding forces west of the Mississippi River, signed the surrender terms offered by Union negotiators. The signing came more than a month after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.
June 2, 1924, saw President Calvin Coolidge sign the Indian Citizenship Act, a measure that extended U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born within the United States and its territories. Prior to the act, Native Americans had been granted citizenship on a case-by-case basis through treaties, naturalization, or military service.
Nearly three decades later, on June 2, 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at London’s Westminster Abbey in a ceremony broadcast globally. She had ascended to the throne the previous year following the death of her father, King George VI. The Queen, then 27, was crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The day’s other milestones range from a White House wedding to a record-breaking game show streak and a landmark city wage policy. In 1886, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, 49, married Frances Folsom, the 21-year-old daughter of his former law partner, in a White House ceremony. Folsom became the youngest first lady in U.S. history.
In 1985, police near San Francisco arrested Leonard Lake, who with accomplice Charles Ng was accused of between 11 and 25 murders. Lake killed himself in jail before trial; Ng was convicted of 11 homicides in 1999 and sentenced to death. In 1992, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. In 1995, a U.S. F-16 fighter jet on patrol over Bosnia was shot down by a Serb-launched missile. The pilot, Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady, ejected safely and was rescued six days later.
In 1997, a federal jury in Denver convicted Timothy McVeigh of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. He was sentenced to death and executed on June 11, 2001. In 2004, Ken Jennings won his first game of Jeopardy!, beginning a 74-game winning streak that earned him more than $2.5 million. In 2010, a British taxi driver in Cumbria, England, killed 13 people and injured 11 others in a shooting rampage before taking his own life.
In 2014, the Seattle City Council voted to approve a $15-an-hour minimum wage, at the time the highest local minimum wage in the nation. The measure phased in over several years for large employers.
Most recently, on June 2, 2024, Mexico elected former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female and first Jewish president, a landmark vote that also continued the policy direction of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.