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On February 2, 1943, the last German soldiers of the 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad, ending the longest and bloodiest battle of World War II. The defeat, which cost the lives of more than 800,000 Axis soldiers, was the definitive turning point on the Eastern Front and the first major defeat of the Third Reich before German public opinion.

On February 2, 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican-American War. Mexico ceded to the US more than 2 million square kilometres of territory — present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado — in exchange for $15 million. It was the largest territorial transfer in American history.

On February 2, 1882, Irish writer James Joyce was born in Dublin — author of Ulysses (1922), considered the most influential novel of the twentieth century and one of the masterpieces of world literature. Joyce revolutionised narrative fiction with the interior monologue and stream of consciousness, techniques that influenced all subsequent literature. He spent most of his life in European exile.