Today in History: June 2, Queen Elizabeth II crowned

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Today in history:Also on this date:Today’s Birthdays:

Today is Monday, June 2, the 153rd day of 2025. There are 212 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On June 2, 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at age 27 at a ceremony in London’s Westminster Abbey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI.

Also on this date:

In 1886, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland became the first president to get married in the White House, wedding 21-year-old Frances Folsom.

In 1924, Congress passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, the Indian Citizenship Act, a measure guaranteeing full American citizenship for all Native Americans born within U.S. territorial limits.

In 1941, baseball’s “Iron Horse,” Lou Gehrig, died in New York of the degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease; he was 37.

In 1966, U.S. space probe Surveyor 1 landed on the moon and began transmitting detailed photographs of the lunar surface.

In 1997, Timothy McVeigh was convicted of murder by a federal jury in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. (McVeigh would be sentenced to death and was executed in 2001.)

In 1999, South Africans went to the polls in their second post-apartheid election, giving the African National Congress a decisive victory; retiring President Nelson Mandela was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki.

In 2012, ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison after a court convicted him on charges of complicity in the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that forced him from power (Mubarak was later acquitted and freed in March 2017; he died in February 2020).

In 2016, autopsy results revealed that musician Prince died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller.