December 2
day of the year
December 2 is the 336th day of the year (337th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 29 days remain until the end of the year.
Events
Pre-1600
1244 – Pope Innocent IV arrives at Lyon for the First Council of Lyon.
1409 – The University of Leipzig opens.
1601–1900
1697 – St Paul's Cathedral, rebuilt to the design of Sir Christopher Wren following the Great Fire of London, is consecrated.
1763 – Dedication of the Touro Synagogue, in Newport, Rhode Island, the first synagogue in what will become the United States.
1766 – Swedish parliament approves the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act and implements it as a ground law, thus being first in the world with freedom of speech.
1804 – At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French.
1805 – War of the Third Coalition: Battle of Austerlitz: French troops under Napoleon decisively defeat a joint Russo-Austrian force.
1823 – Monroe Doctrine: In a State of the Union message, U.S. President James Monroe proclaims American neutrality in future European conflicts, and warns European powers not to interfere in the Americas.
1845 – Manifest Destiny: In a State of the Union message, U.S. President James K. Polk proposes that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.
The public source identifies “December 2” as day of the year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around December and year.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “December 2”, the useful work is to connect “day of the year” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2296. The first chronological checks are 1600, 1244, 1409 and 1601.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “December 2” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.