London, United Kingdom. Major events on June 2 have included Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, the first coronation to be televised, and a successful soft landing on the moon by U.S. spacecraft Surveyor I in 1966.
1953
The coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II took place at Westminster Abbey in London. It was the first coronation to be televised.
1966
U.S. spacecraft Surveyor I made a successful soft landing on the moon and began sending back the first close-up pictures of the moon’s surface.
1979
Pope John Paul II arrived in his native Poland, becoming the first pope to visit a Communist country.
1988
U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street.
1990
British actor Sir Rex Harrison died. He was best known for playing Professor Higgins in the musical “My Fair Lady”.
1997
Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on all counts in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.
1997
Helen Jacobs, a U.S. tennis player, died at the age of 88. She won four successive U.S. singles titles from 1932 to 1935 and won Wimbledon in 1936 when she was ranked number one in the world.
1999
Japanese women won the right to use the birth control pill, more than three decades after it first appeared in the West.
2010
U.S. President Barack Obama awarded singer Paul McCartney the third Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
