December 2 belongs to Owner 337

On December 2, 1942, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in history at Chicago Pile-1, an experimental reactor built under the stands of the University of Chicago stadium. The experiment, part of the Manhattan Project, opened the nuclear age and would lead two years later to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, taking the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII to place it on his own head. The deliberate gesture symbolised that his power came not from God but from himself and the people. Jacques-Louis David immortalised the scene in a famous painting.

On December 2, 1823, US President James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine before Congress, declaring the American continent closed to any new European colonisation and warning that any attempt at intervention would be considered a threat to US security. The doctrine shaped American foreign policy for more than a century.