May 2 in History

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was fought in the Iberian Peninsula by the Iberian nations Spain and Portugal, along with the United Kingdom, against the invading and occupying forces of the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. In Spain, it is considered to overlap with the Spanish War of Independence. It overlapped with the War of the Fifth Coalition (1809) and the War of the Sixth Coalition (1812–1814).

Admiral Sir Charles Howe Fremantle GCB was a British Royal Navy officer. The city of Fremantle, Western Australia, is named after him.

Peruvians are the citizens of Peru. What is now Peru has been inhabited for several millennia by cultures such as the Caral before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Peruvian population decreased from an estimated 5–9 million in the 1520s to around 600,000 in 1620 mainly because of infectious diseases carried by the Spanish. Spaniards and Africans arrived in large numbers in 1532 under colonial rule, mixing widely with each other and with Native Peruvians. During the Republic, there has been a gradual immigration of European people. Chinese and Japanese arrived in large numbers at the end of the 19th century.

The April Uprising was an insurrection organised by the Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire from April to May 1876. The rebellion was suppressed by irregular Ottoman bashi-bazouk units that engaged in indiscriminate slaughter of both rebels and non-combatants.

Menelik II, baptised as Sahle Maryam, was king of Shewa from 1866 to 1889 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1889 to his death in 1913. A member of the Solomonic dynasty, Menelik expanded the Ethiopian Empire to its greatest historical extent and defeated Italian colonial forces at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Ethiopian state.

The first Negro National League was a major professional baseball organization that laid the foundation for Black baseball in the early twentieth century. From 1920 to 1931, during the period of time when organized baseball in the United States was segregated, the league served as the highest level of competition for African American athletes. Under Rube Foster’s leadership, the NNL became one of the first Black baseball leagues to establish lasting stability and organization. The league created conditions that allowed Black teams to compete more consistently than they could in previous decades.

World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, the latter enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the only nuclear weapons used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 60 to 75 million people. Millions died as a result of massacres, starvation, disease, and genocides, including the Holocaust. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

The Surrender at Caserta of 29 April 1945 was the written agreement that formalized the surrender of German and Italian Fascist forces in Italy, ending the Italian Campaign of World War II.

During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners to bargain with the Allies.

The Berthold Seliger Forschungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (BSFEGmbH) was a company founded by West German rocket technical designer Berthold Seliger in 1961. Seliger was a former assistant theoretician professor Dr. Eugen Sänger. The company developed and built prototypes of sounding rockets and launched them near Cuxhaven. The BSFEGmbH cooperated strongly with the Hermann-Oberth-Gesellschaft, of which Berthold Seliger was a member. The first rocket developed by the BSFEGmbH was an improved version of the Kumulus, which was first launched on 19 November 1962 and reached a height of 50 kilometres. On 7 February 1963 the BSFEGmbH launched a two-stage rocket with a maximum height of 80 kilometres and, on 2 May 1963, they launched a three-stage rocket with a maximum flight height of more than 100 kilometres. The latter rocket may have attained the highest flight altitude of all rockets built in post-war Germany. The signals from all these rockets were also received at the observatory in Bochum. After May 1963 the BSFEGmbH worked on the improvement of the steering system of their rockets and thought also on military usable rockets.

In mountaineering and climbing, a first ascent, is the first successful documented climb to the top of a mountain peak or the top of a particular climbing route. Early 20th-century mountaineers and climbers were mainly focused on reaching the tops of notable mountain peaks and the tops of iconic climbing routes by whatever means possible, and often using considerable amounts of aid climbing and/or with large expedition style support teams allowing them to "lay siege" to the climb.

ALM Flight 980 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight that originated in John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, to Princess Juliana International Airport in St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles, on May 2, 1970. After several unsuccessful landing attempts, the aircraft's fuel was exhausted, and it made a forced water landing in the Caribbean Sea 48 km off St. Croix, with 23 fatalities and 40 survivors.

The Falklands War was a ten-week undeclared war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 over two British Overseas Territories in the South Atlantic: the Falkland Islands and its territorial dependency, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The conflict began on 2 April 1982, when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, followed by the invasion of South Georgia the next day. On 5 April the British government dispatched a naval task force to engage the Argentine Navy and Air Force before making an amphibious assault on the islands. The conflict lasted 74 days and ended with an Argentine surrender on 14 June, returning the islands to British control. In total, 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and 3 Falkland Islanders were killed during the hostilities.

The Cold War was a period of international geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc. It began in the aftermath of the Second World War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an arms race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the Space Race, espionage, propaganda campaigns, embargoes, and sports diplomacy.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central component of the Eurosystem and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) as well as one of seven institutions of the European Union. It is one of the world's most important central banks, heading a system with a combined balance sheet of close to €7 trillion.

William Jefferson Clinton is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979 and as the governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981, and again from 1983 to 1992. His centrist "Third Way" political philosophy became known as Clintonism, which dominated his presidency and the succeeding decades of Democratic Party history.

Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Nargis was an extremely deadly and catastrophic tropical cyclone that caused the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Myanmar during early May 2008. The cyclone made landfall in Myanmar on 2 May 2008, sending a storm surge 40 kilometres up the densely populated Irrawaddy delta, causing catastrophic destruction and at least 138,373 fatalities. The Labutta Township alone was reported to have 80,000 dead, with about 10,000 more deaths in Bogale. There were around 55,000 people missing and many other deaths were found in other towns and areas, although the Myanmar government's official death toll may have been under-reported, and there have been allegations that government officials stopped updating the death toll after 138,000 to minimise political fallout. The feared 'second wave' of fatalities from disease and lack of relief efforts never materialised. Damage was at 13 trillion kyat (US$15.3 billion), making Nargis the costliest tropical cyclone on record in the North Indian Ocean at the time, before that record was broken by Amphan in 2020.

Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. A Salafi jihadist, bin Laden worked to establish a pan-Islamist caliphate by using al-Qaeda to organize and fund jihadist militants and terrorists worldwide. Al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 directly killed 2,977 victims, and caused the global war on terror.

On 2 May 2014, a pair of mudslides occurred in Argo District, Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan. The death toll is uncertain, the number of deaths is believed to be at least 350 and no more than 2,700. Around 300 houses were buried and over 14,000 were affected. Rescuers responding to the initial mudslide were struck by a second mudslide, which further hampered rescue efforts.