01010902 This Day In History, September 2

490 BC: The Greek hero Pheidippides died (see Demigod to understand the origin of the term "hero").

47 BC: Cleopatra VII of Egypt declared her son to be co-ruler, with the name Ptolemy XV Caesarion (see The Cleopatra Connection).

31 BC: Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus (as he is also recorded in the Bible i.e. Luke 2:1-7) defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Some historians regard this date to be the end of the Roman Republic (see The Politics Of Rome) and the beginning of the Roman Empire (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars).

1547: Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes died at age 62. The "Conqueror" battled Aztec emperor Montezuma in Mexico.

1649: Castro, Italy was destroyed by military forces at the behest of Pope Innocent X.

1752: The last day that the Julian Calendar (named after Roman emperor Julius Caesar) was used in Britain and its colonies. The present Gregorian calendar (named after Roman Catholic Pope Gregory XIII) began in use the next day.

1807: The British began bombarding Copenhagen to stop Napoleon from using the Danish fleet against Britain.

1859: A solar storm caused outages in telegraph service.

1864: During the U.S. Civil War, Atlanta, Georgia fell to Federal troops.

1870: During the Franco-Prussian War, France suffered a devastating defeat at Sedan when the Germans captured an entire French army along with emperor Napoleon III. The new German Reich chose September 2 - in commemoration of the German victory and French humiliation - as a national holiday. The French response to the German victory was the deposition of Napoleon III and a proclamation of a republican Government of National Defense.

1901: U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt stated his famous imperial policy that the then-emerging U.S. Empire (ironically, the U.S. has become what its founders rebelled against) should "speak softly and carry a big stick."

1935: The "Labor Day Hurricane of 1935" killed over 400 people in the Florida Keys.

1944: Anne Frank, at age 15, was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Dutch-Jewish girl, famous for her Diary of Anne Frank died at the Belsen concentration camp the next year, shortly before it was liberated by Allied troops near the end of the Second World War.

1945: "VJ Day" at the end of the Second World War. Japanese officials signed the terms of surrender with Allied leaders in Tokyo Bay.

1945: Vietnam declared its independence, forming the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The country was later divided into North and South by French imperial forces, triggering the later Vietnam civil war that the U.S. became involved in during the 1960s, before the Vietnamese people were again unified into a single country in the 1970s, free of foreign interference.

1969: At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), computer researchers made the first working connection between two huge, primitive computers. Some regard that event as the birth of the computer network that became the Internet.

1980: Terry Fox (who lost a leg to cancer) was forced to stop his cross-Canada "Marathon of Hope" run at Thunder Bay, Ontario, after he learned that his cancer had returned.

1998: The UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide.

2001: South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard died at age 78. In 1967, he became the first to perform a heart transplant on a live human.