December 2 in History: Bhutto is first elected Muslim woman, Anderson honored, EPA formed, cannabis rescheduled by U.N., more

1763: America’s earliest surviving synagogue is formed. The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, was originally founded as a congregation in 1654. Still active to this day, Touro Synagogue reads a letter each year that it received from George Washington in 1790 about religious liberty.

Umpire Dale Scott, the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, contralto and human rights activist Marian Anderson, abolitionist John Brown, and the EPA logo.

1823: President James Monroe rejects European interference in the western hemisphere in an address that would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. Largely the work of secretary of state John Quincy Adams, the doctrine would be used to justify U.S. imperialism later. 

1859: Abolitionist John Brown becomes the first person in the United States to be hanged for treason, after he sought to arm slaves to fight in what would be an unsuccessful revolt against slavery at Harpers Ferry, W. Va. Brown was captured by future confederate general Robert E. Lee. 

1942: In a development that would lead to the invention of nuclear weapons, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi creates the first-ever self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction as part of the Manhattan Project, while working at the University of Chicago.

1970: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) opens its doors after President Richard Nixon created it to deal with smog, water pollution, toxic waste and other issues raised by Congress’s passage of the National Environmental Policy Act earlier that year.

1978: Marian Anderson, renowned contralto operatic singer, receives a Kennedy Center honor. Anderson would go on to also receive the first-ever Presidential Medal of Freedom the Congressional Gold Medal, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, the United Nations Peace Prize and the NAACP Spingarn Medal.

1988: Benazir Bhutto, 35, becomes the first-ever Muslim woman democratically elected to lead a country, and the first female leader of Pakistan. She’ll become known as a liberal leader who pushes for women’s rights and modernization, until her assassination by Islamists in 2007.

2001: The most prominent fraud case in American history emerges when the Enron corporation files for bankruptcy , leading to 5,600 layoffs and $2.1 billion in lost pensions.

2014: Major League Baseball umpire Dale Scott becomes the first gay man to come out in an American major sports league. Scott had been a major-league umpire for 29 years. 

2020:  Cannabis is rescheduled out of the strictest drug list of the United Nations Commission on Narcotics. It’s placed in a category with morphine and oxycodone, rather than one with fentanyl and heroin. 

Dale Scott photo courtesy Flickr. Other photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.