Today in History

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Today in History

By Correspondent

Today in history
495May 3Pope Gelasius asserted that his authority was superior to Emperor Anastasius.
1010May 3Ansfried (~69), 9th bishop of Utrecht (995-1010), saint, died.
1294May 3Jan I, duke of Brabant (Belgium-Netherlands), Limburg, poet, died.
1455May 3Jews fled Spain.
1469May 3Nicolo Machiavelli (d.1527), political advisor and author, was born. He was a historian and author of “The Prince.” He saw in Cesare Borgia, the bastard son of Pope Alexander VI, the prospect of an Italy free of foreign control. “Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.”
1493May 3Pope Alexander VI issued 3 papal bulls that divided the discoveries of Columbus between Spain and Portugal. By the Bulls of May 3 and 4 he drew an imaginary line one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The May 4 Bull, “Inter Caetera,” was amended in Sep. granting Spain the right to hold lands to the “western regions and to India.” The Patronata Real granted the Spanish throne the privilege and duty of overseeing propagation of Christianity among Spain’s subjects in the New World.
1568May 3French forces in Florida slaughtered hundreds of Spanish.
1621May 3Francis Bacon was accused of bribery.
1624May 3Spanish silver fleet sailed to Panama.
1654May 3A bridge in Rowley, Mass., was permitted to charge a toll for animals, while people crossed for free.
1662May 3John Winthrop the Younger, the son of the first governor of Massachusetts was honored by being made a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s new scientific society. Winthrop gained a new charter from the king, uniting the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven.
1715May 3Edmund Halley observed a total eclipse phenomenon: “Baily’s Beads.”
1791May 3Poland adopted a new Constitution. It was designed to redress long-standing political defects of the Polish”“Lithuanian Commonwealth and its traditional system of “Golden Liberty.” The constitution put Lithuania under Polish domination. It is generally regarded as Europe’s first and the world’s second modern codified national constitution, following the 1788 ratification of the US Constitution.
1802May 3Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city, with the mayor appointed by the president and the council elected by property owners.
1808May 3Spanish executions took place and were later commemorated in Goya’s painting “Executions of 3rd of May.”
1810May 3Lord Byron swam the Hellespont.
1821May 3The Richmond  [Virginia] Light Artillery was organized.
1830May 3The 1st regular steam train passenger service started.
1844May 3Richard D’Oyly Carte, opera impresario (Gilbert & Sullivan operas, Ivanhoe), was born in England.
1849May 3Jacob Riis (d.1914), American reporter and reformer (How the Other Half Lives), was born in Denmark.
1854May 3William Beale (70), composer, died.
1855May 3Macon B. Allen became the first African American to be admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts.
1856May 3Adolphe Charles Adam (52), French composer, critic (Giselle), died.
1859May 3France declared war on Austria.
1861May 3Lincoln asked for 42,000 Army Volunteers and another 18,000 seamen.
1863May 3The Battle of Salem Church took place in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, as part of the Chancellorsville campaign.
1865May 3President Lincoln’s funeral train arrived in Springfield, Illinois.
1866May 3The first submarine in the Americas, a 39-foot vessel designed in the 1860s by German immigrant Karl Flach, sank in the Bay of Valparaiso off the coast of Chile. The crew, two Chileans, two Frenchmen and seven Germans, including Flach and his 15-year-old son, all died. In 2007 a search team found the vessel.
1873May 3Nikolay N. Tcherepnin, composer of ballets, songs, was born in St. Petersburg.
1886May 3Police arrived outside the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago, where 1,400 IWPA workers were on strike. They opened-fire on the crowd while anarchist August Spies was making a speech, killing four of the workers.
1898May 3Golda Mier (d.1978), 4th Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974) and the first woman PM, was born in Kiev, Ukraine. “Whether women are better than men, I cannot say — but I can say they are certainly no worse.”
1902May 3Walter Slezak, actor (Bedtime for Bonzo, Inspector General), was born in Vienna.
1903May 3Bing Crosby (d.1977), singer and actor, was born in Tacoma, Wa. The family soon moved to Spokane where he grew up
1907May 3Show business columnist Earl Wilson was born in Rockford, Ohio.
1910May 3Alceo Galliera, composer, conductor, was born.
1912May 3May Sarton, poet and writer, was born.
1913May 3William Inge, American playwright (Picnic, Bus Stop), was born.
1916May 3Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two others were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter Rising.
1917May 3Kiro Gligorov (d.2012) was born in the central Macedonian town of Shtip. He later served as the first president of Macedonia (1991-1999).
1919May 3Betty Compden, lyricist, was born.
1920May 3John Lewis, jazz pianist, was born.
1921May 3West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.
1923May 3The 1st non-stop flight across the US was made. Army lieutenants Kelly and Macready flew from New York to San Diego.
1926May 3A Pulitzer prize was awarded to Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith).
1928May 3James Brown, “The Godfather of Soul,” was born in Augusta, Georgia. The singer is best remembered for the song “I Feel Good.”
1929May 3Prussia banned anti-fascists.
1931May 3Frank Hoyt Losey (59), composer, died.
1933May 3James Brown, American singer and songwriter, was born. [see May 3, 1928]
1936May 3Joe DiMaggio (21) of San Francisco made his major-league debut as NY Yankee and got 3 hits.
1937May 3Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, “Gone with the Wind.”
1938May 3The concentration camp at Flossenburg opened.
1939May 3Soviet leader Joseph Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, with Vyacheslav Molotov.
1941May 3There was a German air raid on Liverpool.
1942May 3The Luftwaffe bombed Exeter.
1944May 3“Meet Me in St Louis” opened on Broadway.
1945May 3Japanese forces on Okinawa launched their only major counter-offensive, but failed to break the American lines.
1946May 3The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convened in Tokyo for Japanese War Crimes. 28 defendants were tried. Radhabinod Pal, the judge from India, was the only judge with an international law background and the only judge to find all the defendants innocent on all counts.
1947May 3Japan’s postwar constitution, drafted by the Americans, took effect. It included the creation of the House of Councilors and renounced war as a way of settling disputes. Beate Sirota (1923-2012) produced Article 24 which established women’s rights and the essential equality of the sexes. 
1948May 3Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to playwright Tennessee Williams for “A Streetcar Named Desire” and to novelist James Michener for “Tales of the South Pacific.”
1951May 3The Festival of Britain, a national exhibition, officially opened.
1952May 3The first airplane landed at geographic North Pole. It was a ski-modified U.S. Air Force C-47, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict (d.1974) of California and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma. In 2002 Charles B. Compton authored “Born to Fly: Some Life Sketches of Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict.”
1954May 3Pulitzer prize was awarded to Charles A. Lindbergh and John Patrick.
1957May 3A low flying Navy bomber, while practicing evasion maneuvers, sheared two high-voltage lines in the East Bay of San Francisco causing a power outage in SF and the Peninsula.
1958May 3Ismael Valenzuela (1935-2009) rode Tim Tam to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
1960May 3Austria became a founding member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), along with Britain, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. The agreement took effect in 1994.
1961May 3A British Colonial Office telegram stated the general guidance for keeping papers out of the hands of newly elected independent governments. Items should be disposed of if they “might embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers; might compromise sources of intelligence” — or might be used “unethically” by incoming ministers. Under “Operation Legacy”, officials in Kenya, Uganda, Malaysia, Tanzania, Jamaica and other former colonial territories were briefed on how to dispose of documents that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government.” This was only made public in 2013.
1962May 3William A, Eddy (b.1896), former US minister to Saudi Arabia (1944-1946), died. In 2008 Thomas W. Lippman authored “Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy, USMC, and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East.”
1963May 3In Birmingham, Alabama, police Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed dogs and high-powered fire hoses on boycott-bound school children.
1968May 3After three days of battle, the US Marines retook Dai Do complex in Vietnam, only to find the North Vietnamese had evacuated the area.
1971May 3The National Public Radio “All Things Considered” program premiered on 112 NPR stations. NPR, the US national, non-commercial radio network, was founded in 1970 and hit the airwaves in April, 1971.
1973May 3Chicago’s Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building (443 m), topped out. Sears soon moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower. The building was designed by Bruce Graham (d.2010 at 84) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In 2009 the name of the structure was changed to Willis Tower as Willis Group Holdings, a London-based insurance broker, consolidated its area offices in the building.
1975May 3Gov. Jerry Brown of California began a round of private meetings to resolve the issues between the UFW, agribusiness, and the Teamsters Union.
1978May 3“Sun Day” fell on a Thursday as thousands of people extolling the virtues of solar energy held events across the country.
1979May 3In the Philippines a UN Conference on Trade and Development opened as thousands of squatters around Manila were forcibly moved out of sight.
1982May 3Sinbad the Sailor, the star horse of Ronald Reagan’s “Death Valley Days” TV series, died when he was struck by lightning at Kanab, Utah.
1986May 3In NASA’s first post-Challenger launch, an unmanned Delta rocket lost power in its main engine shortly after liftoff, forcing safety officers to destroy it by remote control.
1987May 3The Miami Herald, in its Sunday edition, said its reporters had observed a young woman spending “Friday night and most of Saturday” at a Washington, D.C., townhouse belonging to Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The woman was later identified as Donna Rice; the scandal torpedoed Hart’s presidential bid.
1988May 3Milton A. Caniff (b.1907), US cartoonist (Terry & the Pirates), died.
1989May 3Christine Jorgensen (b.1926), Denmark-born 1st transsexual (1952), died in California. Her book “Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography” was published in 1967, and its film adaptation was released in 1970 as The Christine Jorgensen Story.
1990May 3The US federal government approved the use of the drug AZT to treat children infected with the AIDS virus.
1991May 3The US government reported the nation’s civilian unemployment rate fell in April to 6.6%.
1992		May 3In Los Angeles, soldiers continued to patrol streets and guard fire-gutted and ransacked stores in the wake of rioting that erupted following the Rodney King-taped beating acquittals.
1992May 3Yugoslav Army seized Bosnian Pres. Alija Izetbegovic on his return from peace talks in Lisbon. He was released the next day.
1993May 3“Kiss of the Spider Woman” opened at Broadhurst in NYC for 906 performances. John Kander composed the music and Fred Ebb (d.2004) wrote the lyrics.
1994May 3President Clinton presided over a televised forum from Atlanta, during which he denied suggestions he’d vacillated on foreign policy, but said global problems were more difficult than he’d imagined.
1995May 3The US government reported that its Index of Leading Economic Indicators dropped half a percentage point in March 1995, its biggest tumble in two years.
1996May 3Gregory Clepper was charged with killing 12 women on the South side of Chicago in a string of slayings that began in 1991.
1997May 3World chess champion Garry Kasparov won the first game of his rematch with IBM’s Deep Blue computer. However, he lost the six-game match.
1998May 3It was reported that the drugs angiostatin and endostatin eradicated cancer in mice and that human trials could begin within a year. The drugs were discovered by Harvard scientist Judah Folkman. Their operation was explained in 1999 by researchers at Duke.
1999May 3In Baltimore the Cuban baseball team beat the Baltimore Orioles 12-6. 7 members missed the departure the next day and one coach, Rigoberto Betancourt Herrera, was reported to have defected, as the others over slept. The 6 stragglers departed May 5.
2000May 3Gen. Wesley Clark left his post as NATO’s supreme allied commander. He was replaced by Gen. Joseph Ralston.
2001May 3An estimated 36.4 million people tuned in to watch Tennessee nurse Tina Wesson win as the winner of “Survivor 2,” following a 42 day stint in the “Survivor: The Australian Outback” on CBS.
2002May 3The US Labor Dept. reported the April jobless rate at 6%, up .3%.
2003May 3In the Kentucky Derby Jose Santos rode Funny Cide to victory.
2004May 3The US military said it had reprimanded seven officers in the abuse of inmates at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the first known punishments in the case; two of the officers were relieved of their duties.
2005May 3American troops and Afghan police killed 64 rebels and captured six during a battle in the mountains of southern Afghanistan. 9 Afghan troops and one policeman were also killed in the clashes in the southern provinces of Zabul and Kandahar.
2006May 3In their second meeting at the White House, President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to keep pressing Iran on its nuclear program as other allies took the issue to the United Nations.
2007May 3A US House panel called on the VA chief to explain why top officials got hefty bonuses even as veteran’s care deteriorated.
2008May 3Big Brown pulled won the Kentucky Derby 4 3/4 lengths ahead of the filly Eight Belles, who was euthanized by injection on the track with 2 broken ankles.
2009May 3In California Briant Rodriguez (3) was kidnapped by 2 gunmen who broke into his family’s home in San Bernadino.
2010May 3Faisal Shahzad (30), a US citizen who had recently returned from a five-month trip to his native Pakistan, was arrested at a New York airport on charges that on May 1 he drove a bomb-laden SUV meant to cause a fireball in Times Square.
2011May 3US analysts scoured a trove of secrets grabbed from Osama bin Laden’s fortified hideout for evidence of the slain terrorist’s support network in Pakistan.
2012May 3US federal authorities said a Miami-based crime ring stat stole at least $80 million worth of prescription drugs has been broken up following a 3-year FBI probe. 22 people were charged in New Jersey, Connecticut and Miami.
2013May 3President Barack Obama in Mexico City said he wants to set aside old stereotypes that have created misunderstanding between Mexico and the United States.
 Source: Timelines of History 

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