Today in history

On Dec. 2, 1804, Napoleon was crowned emperor of France.

In 1823 President James Monroe outlined his doctrine opposing European expansion in the Western Hemisphere.

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 1 minute past midnight.

In 1942 a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated for the first time, at the University of Chicago.

In 1954 the Senate voted to condemn Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”

In 1961 Cuban leader Fidel Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist who would lead Cuba to communism.

In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency began operating under director

William Ruckelshaus.

In 1980 four American churchwomen were raped, murdered and buried outside San Salvador. (Five national 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 Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot to death by security forces in Medellin.

In 1994 the government agreed not to seek a recall of allegedly fire-prone General Motors pickup trucks, striking a deal with GM under which the automaker would spend more than $51 million on safety and research. Also in 1994, reputed “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss was convicted in Los Angeles of three counts of pandering.

In 1998 Microsoft’s Bill Gates donated $100 million to help immunize children in developing countries.

In 1999, in Northern Ireland, a power-sharing Cabinet of Protestants and Catholics sat down together for the first time.

In 2000 NASA launched a U.S.-European observatory on a $1 billion mission to study the sun.

In 2001 in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history, Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection.

In 2003 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that after knocking, police do not have to wait longer than 20 seconds before breaking into the home of a drug suspect.

In 2005 North Carolina inmate Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th person executed since the U.S. resumed capital punishment in 1977.

In 2014 the Chicago City Council overwhelmingly approved raising the city’s minimum wage to $13 an hour from $8.25 by mid-2019. Also in 2014, a massive outage cut power for as long as six hours to public buildings in Detroit, resulting in another black eye for the beleaguered city as it emerged from bankruptcy