Reuters historical calendar - June 2

LONDON, June 1 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 2 since 1900: 1924 - The US Congress conferred citizenship upon all American Indians.

1932 - Major Frank Holmes, a New Zealand engineer, struck oil for the first time in Bahrain.

1953 - The coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II took place at Westminster Abbey in London; it was the first coronation to be televised.

1961 - George S Kaufman, US playwright and twice Pulitzer Prize winner, died.

1966 - US spacecraft Surveyor I made a successful soft landing on the moon and began sending back the first close-up pictures of the moon's surface.

1969 - Seventy-four American sailors were killed when the Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne collided with the US destroyer Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea.

1990 - British actor Sir Rex Harrison died. He was best known for playing the role of Professor Higgins in the musical ''My Fair Lady''.

1997 - Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on all counts in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.

1997 - Helen Jacobs, US tennis player, died at the age of 88. She won four successive U.S. singles titles (1932-1935), and then won Wimbledon in 1936 when she was ranked number one in the world.

1999 - Japanese women won the right to use the birth control pill, more than three decades after it first appeared in the West.

2001 - Colombia's government and leftist FARC rebels signed an agreement allowing the first prisoner exchange in the 37-year-old war.

2002 - In a referendum, the Swiss people accepted by a nearly three-to-one margin a proposal to drastically relax strict abortion laws, bringing legislation in line with most other European countries.

2004 - Nicolai Ghiaurov, Bulgarian opera singer, famous for bass roles such as Don Basilio in ''The Barber of Seville'' and Mephistopheles in ''Faust'', died. He was 74.

2005 - The Latvian parliament overwhelmingly approved the European Union constitution, a day after Dutch voters rejected the treaty in a referendum.

REUTERS SBC PM1021