August 2

• August 2, 216 BC
  Hannibal's Carthaginian army destroys 16 Roman legions under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro at Battle of Cannae
• August 2, 1589
  Henry III, the last King of the House of Valois, is assassinated by Jacques Clément, a fanatically religious and an ardent partisan of the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion
• August 2, 1645
  Turkish invaders of the Ottoman Empire capture Chania on the island of Crete beginning the Cretan War with Republic of Venice
• August 2, 1790
  The enumeration for the first US census, authorized by President Washington, shows that 3,929,326 people are living in the US of which 697,681 are slaves, and that the largest city is New York City with 33,000 inhabitants
• August 2, 1802
  Napoleon Bonaparte is proclaimed "Consul for Life" by the French Senate after a plebiscite from the French people
• August 2, 1830
  Charles X abdicates in favor of his grandson Henry, Duke of Bordeaux
• August 2, 1831
  The Dutch army, headed by the Dutch princes, invades Belgium, in the so-called Ten Days' Campaign, and defeat Belgian forces near Hasselt and Leuven
• August 2, 1832
  Some 1,300 Illinois militia under General Henry Atkinson massacre Indians in Battle of Bad Axe, the final battle of Black Hawk War between the United States and Native Americans led by Black Hawk, a Sauk leader
• August 2, 1865
  A transatlantic cable being laid by SS Great Eastern snaps and is lost
• August 2, 1932
  American physicist Carl David Anderson discovers the anti-electron, when observes unexpected particle tracks in cloud chamber during investigation of cosmic rays, and calls is the positron
• August 2, 1939
  Einstein–Szilárd letter, a letter written by Leó Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein, is sent to the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research
• August 2, 1964
  North Vietnam fires on a US destroyer in Gulf of Tonkin
• August 2, 1990
  Iraq invades and occupies Kuwait, beginning the Persian Gulf War, a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq
• August 2, 1998
  Second Congo War, the bloodiest war since World War II, begins