Today in History
~ May 3
Events
1455 - Jews flee Spain
1494 - Jamaica discovered by Columbus; he names it "St Iago"
1621 - Francis Bacon accused of bribery
1624 - Spanish silver fleet sails to Panama
1662 - Royal charter granted Connecticut
1715 - Edmund Halley observes total eclipse phenomenon "Baily's Beads"
1802 - Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.
1808 - Goya's "Executions of 3rd of May"
1810 - Lord Byron swims Hellespont
1830 - 1st regular steam train passenger service starts.
1841 - New Zealand Becomes a British Colony
1845 - 1st black lawyer (Macon B Allen) admitted to bar (Mass)
1861 - Gen Winfield Scott presents his Anaconda Plan
1861 - Lincoln asks for 42,000 Army Volunteers & another 18,000 seamen
1862 - Confederate troops evacuate the Yorktown-Warwick Line in Virginia
1863 - Battle of Chancellorsville -- Union army withdraws
1863 - Battle of Fredricksburg, VA (Marye's Heights) - Longstreet's Confederates pour deadly fire on open-field Union troops
1898 - Camp Merriman established at the Presidio.
1916 - Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two
others were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter Rising.
1919 - America's 1st passenger flight. Pilot Robert Hewitt flew two women from
New York to Atlantic
City, New Jersey.
1921 - West Virginia imposed the first state sales
tax.
1923 - 1st nonstop transcontinental flight (NY-San Diego) completed
1926 - British general strike-3 million workers support miners
1926 - Pulitzer prize awarded to Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith)
1926 - US marines land in Nicaragua (9 months after leaving), stay until 1933
1929 - Prussia bans anti-fascists
1936 - NY Yankee Joe DiMaggio makes his major-league debut, gets 3 hits
1937 - Margaret Mitchell wins Pulitzer Prize for "Gone With the Wind"
1938 - Concentration camp at Flossenberg opens
1938 - Vatican recognizes Franco's Catholic, fascist Spain
1941 - German air raid on Liverpool
1942 - Germans begin "Baedeker Raids" on England
1942 - Luftwaffe bombs Exeter
1942 - Nazis execute 72 in reprisial in Sachsenhausen, Netherlands
1944 - "Meet Me in St Louis" opens on Broadway
1944 - Meat rationing ends in US
1945 - Allies arrest German nuclear physicst Werner Heisenberg
1945 - Indian forces captured Rangoon, Burma, from
the Japanese.
1945 - German ship "Cap Arcona" sinks, 5,800 killed
1946 - International military tribunal in Tokyo begins (Japanese War Crimes Trials)
1947 - Japan forms a constitutional democracy [H]
1948 - The Supreme Court ruled that covenants
prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks or members of other racial groups
were legally unenforceable.
1948 - Pulitzer prize awarded to James Michener (Tales of the South Pacific) & Tennessee Williams
1948 - The CBS Evening News premiered, with Douglas Edwards as anchor.
1952 - Fletcher Lands on the North Pole [H]
1954 - Pulitzer prize awarded to Charles A Lindbergh & John Patrick
1958 - WINS suspends Alan Freed for causing a riot in Boston, he quits
1960 - Harvey Schmidt/Tom Jones' musical "Fantasticks," premieres in NYC
1963 - Martin Luther King Jr delivers his "I have a dream" speech
1968 - The United States and North Vietnam agreed to open peace talks in Paris.
1967 - Black students seize finance building at Northwestern U
1971 - All Things Considered premieres on 112 National Public Radio stations. The birth of National Public Radio (NPR), the US national, non-commercial radio network.
1971 - Anti-war protesters began four days of
demonstrations in Washington aimed at shutting down the nation's capital.
13,000 arrests were made.
1971 - Pulitzer prize awarded to John Toland (Rising Sun)
1973 - Chicago's Sears Tower, world's tallest building (443 m), topped out
1978 - "Sun Day" fell on a Thursday as
thousands of people extolling the virtues of solar energy held events across the
country.
1979 - 1st woman prime minister in British history (Margaret Thatcher). The Conservative Party defeated the ruling Labour Party, and Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservatives, became the first female prime
minister prime minister of a major European nation.
1983 - Soviet leader Andropov decreases nuclear weapons in Europe
1986 - In 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.
1987 - Davey Allison recorded his first NASCAR Winston Cup victory in Talladega, Alabama
[H]
1989 - Chinese leaders rejected students' demands for democratic reforms as some
100,000 students and workers marched in Beijing.
1989 - Former national security aide Oliver North was found guilty on three
charges but innocent of nine others in
the Iran-Contra scandal.
1990 - President Bush canceled the modernization of NATO short-range nuclear
missiles and artillery, accelerating the pace of the removal of U.S. and Soviet
ground-based nuclear weapons from "the transformed Europe of the
1990s."
1991 - The government reported the nation's
civilian unemployment rate fell in April to 6.6 percent.
1991 - Exxon Corp. and the state of Alaska withdrew from a $1 billion settlement
of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (another settlement was reached later).
1992 - Police in Ames, Iowa, arrested more than 100 people after a boozy college
campus spring festival got out of hand.
1992 - In 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.
1993 - Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi attacked Muslim fundamentalists, saying
they should be killed "like dogs."
1993 - "Kiss of the Spider Woman" opens at Broadhurst NYC for 906 performances
1994 - A federal judge in Seattle struck down Washington state's
assisted-suicide law.
1996 - An international conference in Geneva ended
30 months of arduous negotiations over whether to ban land mines with a weak
compromise treaty giving countries nine years to switch to detectable,
self-destructive devices.
1997 - A standoff by armed separatists near Fort Davis, Texas, ended with
the surrender of six people, including
leader Richard McLaren. however, two armed followers fled into the woods (one
was one was shot to death by police, the other eventually captured).
1997 - World chess champion Garry Kasparov won the first game of his
much-anticipated rematch with IBM's Deep Blue computer. (However, Kasparov ended
up losing the six-game match.)
1997 - "Silver Charm" won the 123rd Kentucky Derby.
1999 - 76 tornadoes tore across the Plains states, killing about 50 people and injuring more than 700
2000 - 2000, the trial of two Libyan men (Abdel
Basset Ali al-Megrahi, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah) ,accused in the 1988
bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, began in the Netherlands.
2001 - The United States lost its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for
the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.
2001 - An estimated 36.4 million people tuned in to watch Tennessee nurse Tina
Wesson win "Survivor: The Australian Outback" on CBS.
Birthdays
Today
1469 - Niccolo Machiavelli, Italy, politician/writer (The Prince)
1844 - Richard D'Oyly Carte, England, opera impresario (Gilbert & Sullivan operas, Ivanhoe)
1849 - Jacob Riis, Denmark, reporter (NY Tribune, NY Evening Sun)
1873 - Nikolay N Tcherepnin, St Petersburg, composer of ballets, songs
1874 - Francois Coty, perfumemaker.
1898 - Golda Meir, [Meyerson], Kiev Ukraine, 4th Israeli PM (1969-74)
1902 - Walter Slezak, Vienna, actor (Bedtime for Bonzo, Inspector General)
1903 - Bing Crosby, Tacoma Wash, singer (White Christmas, Going My Way)
1907 - Earl Wilson (entertainment writer)
1910 - Alceo Galliera, composer/conductor
1910 - Norman Corwin (writer)
1912 - Virgil Fox (organist)
1919 - Betty Comden (lyricist with Adolph Green: It's Always Fair Weather, On the Town, Billion Dollar, Singin' in the Rain)
1919 - Pete Seeger (folk singer: groups: Almanac Singers, Weavers; solo: Little Boxes; songwriter: Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, Turn, Turn, Turn, co-wrote: If I Had a Hammer; social, civil and political activist)
1920 - Sugar Ray Robinson (middleweight boxer: only boxer to win world title at one weight five times)
1924 - Joe Ames (singer: group: The Ames Brothers: Undecided, The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, Ragmop, Tammy)
1926 - Jimmy Cleveland (composer, musician: trombone: group: Jay & Kai Octet, played with Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk)
1926 - Jimmy Cleveland (composer, musician:)
1928 - Dave Dudley (Pedruska) (country singer: groups: The Dave Dudley Trio, The Country Gentlemen, The Roadrunners: Six Days On the Road, Mad, Truck Drivin' Sun of a Gun, Vietnam Blues)
1928 - James Brown (The Godfather of Soul: singer: Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Please, Please, Please, I Got You (I Feel Good), It's A Man's Man's Man's World, Living in America; Rock and Roll Hall of Famer [1986])
1931 - Joe Layton (Lichtman) (choreographer)
1937 - Frankie Valli (Francis Castellucio) (falsetto singer: group: The Four Seasons: Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Rag Doll, Let's Hang On; solo: Can't Take My Eyes Off You, My Eyes Adored You, Swearin' To God, December '63 [Oh What a Night], Grease)
1938 - Rudy (Rudolf) Jacobs (jazz musician)
1939 - Samantha Eggar (actress: Doctor Doolittle, Exterminator)
1946 - Davey Lopes (baseball: LA Dodgers)
1947 - Doug Henning (magician)
1948 - Gar Heard (basketball)
1950 - Mary Hopkin (singer: Those Were the Days, Goodbye, Temma Harbour, If You Love Me)
1951 - Christopher Cross (Geppert) (Oscar-winning singer: Arthur's Theme (Best that You can Do); 5 Grammy Awards [1981]; singer, songwriter: Sailing, Ride like the Wind, Say You'll be Mine, Think of Laura)
Famous
deaths
1010 - Ansfried, 9th bishop of Utrecht (995-1010)/saint, dies at about 69
1294 - Jan I, duke of Brabant/Limburg/poet, dies
1854 - William Beale, composer, dies at 70
1856 - Adolphe Charles Adam, French composer/critic (Giselle), dies at 52
1916 - Padraic Pearse, Irish nationalist, executed by British firing squad for
his role in the Easter Rising.
1926 - Napoleon V Bonaparte, French pretender to the throne, dies at 63
1931 - Frank Hoyt Losey, composer, dies at 59
1942 - Johan H Westerveld, lt-col/leader Order Service, executed
1972 - Dan Blocker, actor (Hoss-Bonanza), dies at 43
1989 - Christine Jorgensen, 1st transsexual, dies at 62
1991 - Jersy Kosinski, author (Being There), suicide at 57
1992 - Hollywood song-and-dance man-turned-politician George Murphy died at age
89.
1996 - Jack Weston, actor (Ishtar, Rad, Cuba), dies of lymphoma at 71
2000 - The archbishop of New York, Cardinal John
O'Connor, died at age 80.
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