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

June 23

• June 23, 207 BC
  Carthage is defeated by Roman armies led by the consuls Marcus Livius and Gaius Claudius Nero in the Battle of the Metaurus, while Carthaginian general Hasdrubal is killed, which becomes key battle in the Second Punic War
• June 23, 1606
  Treaty of Vienna ends anti-Habsburg uprising in Royal Hungary
• June 23, 1757
  Forces of the East India Company led by Robert Clive defeat Indians in Battle of Plassey marking the beginning of formal British rule in India after years of commercial activity
• June 23, 1758
  British and Hanoverian armies defeat the French at Krefeld in Germany
• June 23, 1775
  First regatta is hold on Thames, England
• June 23, 1845
  The congress of the Republic of Texas vote to accept annexation by the US after 10 years as an independent republic
• June 23, 1848
  A bloody insurrection of workers in Paris, later ruthlessly suppressed by General Cavaignac, erupts to protest inflation, unemployment and corruption
• June 23, 1865
  Confederate General Stand Watie, who was also a Cherokee chief, surrenders the last sizable Confederate army at Fort Towson, in the Oklahoma Territory
• June 23, 1894
  The International Olympic Committee is created by French Baron Pierre de Coubertin with Demetrios Vikelas as its first president
• June 23, 1938
  Marineland, the world's first oceanarium, opens in Florida, United States
• June 23, 1956
  Gamal Abdel Nasser is elected president of Egypt and new constitution of Egypt is accepted at referendum
• June 23, 1960
  Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, approve Enovid, the first combined oral contraceptive pill, for contraceptive use
• June 23, 2010
  Marina Bay Sands, a casino-based vacation resort, is officially opened in Singapore and becomes the 2nd most expensive building in the world

June 21

• June 21, 217 BC
  Roman army is ambushed and destroyed by Hannibal's army, numbering around 55,000 troops, at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, which becomes the largest ambush in military history
• June 21, 1377
  Edward III, King of England, dies
• June 21, 1547
  The great fire in Moscow destroys sections of Moscow which had been built almost entirely of wood including some building in the Kremlin
• June 21, 1607
  The Church of England Episcopal Church, the first Protestant Episcopal parish in America, is established at Jamestown
• June 21, 1661
  Sweden signs the Treaty of Cardis, in which Russia agrees to return to Sweden areas it had conquered in the Baltic lands
• June 21, 1675
  Sir Christopher Wren begins to rebuild St Paul's Cathedral in London, replacing the old building which has been destroyed by the Great fire
• June 21, 1749
  English transport ships land 2576 colonists on what is now Nova Scotia to establish a British military base, naming the town Halifax
• June 21, 1788
  New Hampshire ratifies the United States Constitution as the ninth state, and by the terms of Article VII it is in effect
• June 21, 1834
  Obed Hussey, an American inventor, patents mechanical reaping machine
• June 21, 1887
  Britain celebrates the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria
• June 21, 1893
  George Washington Gale Ferris, engineer, completes the construction of a 77-meter high revolving steel wheel with 38 passenger cars, each with 40 plush chairs, for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the first Ferris wheel
• June 21, 1897
  In Austria a giant Ferris wheel, designed by Walter Bassett of England, is opened in Vienna to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the accession of Emperor Franz Joseph to the Habsburg throne
• June 22, 1940
  After German blitz France formally surrenders at the signing ceremony, held in the same wagon-lit railroad car used by French Marshal Ferdinand Foch to accept the surrender of Germany in 1918
• June 21, 1948
  In a lab in Manchester, England, the Small Scale Experimental Machine computer, nicknamed "Baby" is created, the first to contain memory (128 bytes) which could store a program
• June 21, 1985
  It is confirmed by American, German, and Brazilian forensic pathologists that the body exhumed in Brazil on June 6 is, indeed, that of the German physician in Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele