On March 2
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly March 2. The closest is Emancipation of the serfs in Russia on March 3, 1861 (1 day later).
This week in history (Feb 28 to Mar 5)
On 3 March 1861 (19 February in the Russian Julian calendar) Tsar Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing more than 23 million privately held serfs and inaugurating the most far-reaching reform of nineteenth-century Russia.
On 1 March 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park in the territories of Wyoming and Montana, creating the first federally protected national park in the world.
On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, an Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II decisively defeated an invading Italian colonial force led by General Oreste Baratieri.
Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered an address officially titled "The Sinews of Peace." In it he warned that "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste…
On 1 March 1954 the United States detonated Castle Bravo, a lithium-deuteride-fuelled thermonuclear device, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands as the opening shot of Operation Castle.
On 3 March 1918 the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire), formally ending Russia's participation in World War I.