May 3 in history

On May 3:

1469 Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian historian and political author was born (d. 1527).

1491  Kongo monarch Nkuwu Nzinga was baptised by Portuguese missionaries, adopting the baptismal name of João I.

 

1494  Christopher Columbus first sighted what is now known as Jamaica.

1715 Edmund Halley’s total solar eclipse.

1768 Charles Tennant, Scottish chemist and industrialist, was born (d. 1838).

1791  The Constitution of May 3 (the first modern constitutionin Europe)  was proclaimed by the Sejm of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

 

1802  Washington, D.C. was incorporated as a city.

1808  Finnish War: Sweden lost the fortress of Sveaborg to Russia.

1808 Peninsular War: The Madrid rebels were fired upon near Príncipe Pío hill.

 The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya

1815 Neapolitan War: Joachim Murat, King of Naples was defeated by the Austrians at the Battle of Tolentino, the decisive engagement of the war.

1820 Missionary John Butler turned the first furrow at Kerikeri, becoming the first to use a European plough in New Zealand.

1830  The Canterbury and Whitstable Railway was opened – the first steam hauled passenger railway to issue season tickets and include a tunnel.

 

1837  The University of Athens was founded.

1844 Richard D’Oyly Carte, English theatrical impresario was born (d. 1901).

 

1849  The May Uprising in Dresden began – the last of the German revolutions of 1848.

1860 Charles XV of Sweden-Norway was crowned king of Sweden.  

1867 The Hudson’s Bay Company gave up all claims to Vancouver Island.

 

1877  Labatt Park, the oldest continually operating baseball grounds in the world had its first game.

1887 Margaret Cruickshank became the first woman to be registered as a doctor in New Zealand.

1898  Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, was born(d. 1978).

1901 The Great Fire of 1901 began in Jacksonville, Florida.

 

1903  Bing Crosby, American singer and actor, was born  (d. 1977).

1913  Raja Harishchandra the first full-length Indian feature film was released.

1915 The poem In Flanders Fields was written by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.

1916 The leaders of the Easter Rising were executed in Dublin.

 

1919 Pete Seeger, American singer, was born.

1920 A Bolshevik coup failsedin the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

1921 Sugar Ray Robinson, American boxer was born (d. 1989).

1921 Joe Ames, American singer, was born (d. 2007).

1926  Ann B. Davis, American actress Alice on The Brady Bunch, was born.

1928  Japanese atrocities in Jinan, China.

1933  Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first woman to head the United States Mint.

1933 James Brown, American singer and dancer, was born (d. 2006).

1934 Frankie Valli, American singer (The Four Seasons), was born.

1937  Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

1942  World War II: Japanese naval troops invaded Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands during the first part of Operation Mo .

1945 World War II: Sinking of the prison ships Cap Arcona, Thielbek and Deutschland by the Royal Air Force in Lübeck Bay.

1946 International Military Tribunal for the Far East began in Tokyo with twenty-eight Japanese military and government officials accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

1947 New post-war Japanese constitution went into effect.

 

1948  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities were legally unenforceable.

1951  London’s Royal Festival Hall openedwith the Festival of Britain.

 

1951 The United States Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees begin their closed door hearings into the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by U.S. President Harry Truman.

1951 – The Kentucky Derby was televised for the first time.

1951 Christopher Cross, American musician, was born.

1952  Lieutenant Colonels Joseph O. Fletcher and William P. Benedict landed a plane at the North Pole.

 

1960  The Off-Broadway musical comedy, The Fantasticks, openedin Greenwich Village, eventually becoming the longest-running musical of all time.

1960 – The Anne Frank House opensedin Amsterdam.

 

1963 The police force in Birmingham, Alabama switches tactics and responded with violent force to stop the “Birmingham campaign” protesters.

 

1973 The Sears Tower in Chicago was topped out as the world’s tallest building.

1978  The first unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (later  known as “spam“) was sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.

1986  Twenty-one people were killed and forty-one are injured after a bomb exploded in an airliner (Flight UL512) at Colomb  airport in Sri Lanka.

1991 The Declaration of Windhoek was signed.

1999  Oklahoma City was slammed by an F5 tornado killing forty-two people, injuring 665, and causing $1 billion in damage. One of 66 from the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak, this was the strongest tornado ever recorded with wind speeds of up to 318 mph.

2000  The sport of geocaching began, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet.

 

2002 A military MiG-21 aircraft crashed into the Bank of Rajasthan in India, killing eight.

2003  New Hampshire’s famous Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.

 

2006 Armavia Flight 967 crashed into the Black Sea, killing 113 people on board, with no survivors.

Sourced from NZ History Online & WIkipedia