Historical Events on May 3
- 1837: In the city of Athens in Greece, the University of Athens is started.
- 1855: William Walker and sixty men leave San Francisco it conquer Nicaragua.
- 1867: The Hudson Bay Company gives up its claim to Vancouver Island.
- 1921: West Virginia is the first U.S State to pass a law creating a broad-sweeping sales tax. However, it isn’t implemented for several years due to problems with enforcement.
- 1937: Margaret Mitchell wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Gone with the Wind.
- 1942: Imperial Japanese naval forces invade Tulagi Island in the Solomon Island Chain. This will result in the Battle of the Coral Sea between Japanese forces and U.S and Australian forces.
- 1947: A new Japanese constitution goes into effect after WWII.
- 1948: The United States Supreme Court rules that courts cannot enforce racial covenants on real estate during Shelley v. Kraemer.
- 1951: Royal Festival Hall in London opens on this day.
- 1951: Closed-door hearing on the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by United States President Harry Truman is begun by the U.S Senate Committee on the Armed Services & the U.S Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
- 1978: A Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative sends a bulk commercial email to every ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) address on the Western Coast of the U.S. This is the first official instance of SPAM.
- 1986: After a bomb explodes on Flight UL 512 in Sri Lanka, 21 people are killed and another 41 are injured.
- 1999: Over 660 people are injured and another 45 are killed during an F5 tornado in Oklahoma City.
Famous Birthdays on May 3
- German-French physicist, poet and Nobel Prize laureate, Alfred Kastler is born in 1902.
- American singer and actor, Bing Crosby is born in 1903.
- American actress Mary Astor is born in 1906.
- American poet and novelist, May Sarton is born in 1912.
- American novelist and playwright, William Inge is born in 1913.
- American singer-songwriter James Brown is born in 1933.
American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, Steven Weinberg is born in 1933.
