Today is Sunday, Aug. 2, the 214th day of 2026. There are 151 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On August 2, 1876, frontiersman “Wild Bill” Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, by Jack McCall, who was later hanged.
Also on this date:
In 1790, the first United States Census began under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson; a total of 3,929,214 people were counted in the census, nearly 700,000 of whom were enslaved.
In 1873, inventor Andrew S. Hallidie successfully tested a cable car he had designed for the city of San Francisco.
In 1921, a jury in Chicago acquitted seven former members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team and two others of conspiring to defraud the public in the notorious “Black Sox” scandal (though they would later be banned from Major League Baseball for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis).
In 1923, the 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died in San Francisco; Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.
In 1934, German President Paul von Hindenburg died, paving the way for Adolf Hitler’s complete takeover.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Britain’s new prime minister, Clement Attlee, concluded the Potsdam conference.
In 1974, former White House counsel John W. Dean III was sentenced to one to four years in prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate cover-up. (Dean ended up serving four months.)
In 1985, 137 people were killed when Delta Air Lines Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashed while attempting to land at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate. (The Iraqis were driven out of Kuwait months later in 1991 by a U.S.-led military coalition in Operation Desert Storm.)
In 2014, a suspected dust explosion at an auto parts factory in eastern China that supplies General Motors killed 146 people in the country’s worst industrial accident in years. The blast happened at Zhongrong Metal Products Co. Ltd. in Kunshan.
In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan two days earlier. Al-Zawahri and Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces in 2011, had plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.
Today’s Birthdays:
- Author Isabel Allende is 84.
- Actor Butch Patrick (TV: “The Munsters”) is 73.
- Rock music producer/drummer Butch Vig is 71.
- Actor Mary-Louise Parker is 62.
- Filmmaker Kevin Smith is 56.
- Actor Sam Worthington is 50.
- Actor Edward Furlong is 49.
- U.S. President JD Vance is 42.
- Actor Lily Gladstone is 40.
- Singer Charli XCX is 34.
- Olympic swimming gold medalist Simone Manuel is 30.
- Actor Ayden Mekus is 21.
