History of the Day for:
May 3
- 1802: Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.
- 1916: Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two others were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter Rising.
- 1921: West Virginia became the first state to impose a sales tax.
- 1933: The U.S. Mint was under the direction of a woman, Nellie Ross, for the first time.
- 1944: In World War II, meat rationing ended.
- 1945: Indian forces captured Rangoon, Burma, from the Japanese.
- 1948: The Supreme Court ruled covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities were unenforceable; Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to playwright Tennessee Williams for "A Streetcar Named Desire" and to novelist James Michener for "Tales of the South Pacific."
- 1952: An airplane first landed at the North Pole.
- 1957: Brooklyn Dodgers' owner Walter O'Malley agreed to move the team from Flatbush, N.Y., to Los Angeles.
- 1960: The play, "The Fantasticks" opened at the Sullivan Playhouse in New York City and would become the longest?running off-Broadway play.
- 1971: Anti-war protesters began four days of demonstrations in Washington, D,C., aimed at shutting down the nation's capital; National Public Radio made its debut.
- 1979: Margaret Thatcher was elected Britain's first female prime minister.
- 1986: Twenty-one people are killed and forty-one are injured after a bomb explodes in an airliner (Flight UL512) at Colombo airport in Sri Lanka.
- 1987: A crash by Bobby Allison at the Talladega Superspeedway, Alabama fencing at the start-finish line would lead NASCAR to develop restrictor plate racing the following season both at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega.
- 1991: The Declaration of Windhoek is signed.
- 1999: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is slammed by an F5 tornado killing forty-two people, injuring 665, and causing $1 billion in damage. The tornado is one of 66 from the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak. This is the strongest tornado ever recorded with wind speeds up up to 318 mph.
- 1999: Stephen Hendry defeats Mark Williams 18-11 to win the World Snooker Championship for a record seventh time.
- 2000: The sport of geocaching begins, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet.
- 2001: The United States loses its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.
- 2002: A military MiG-21 aircraft crashes into the Bank of Rajasthan in India, killing eight.
- 2003: New Hampshire's famous Old Man of the Mountain collapses.
- 2006: Armavia Flight 967 crashes into the Black Sea, killing 113 people on board, with no survivors.
- 2006: Zacarias Moussaoui is sentenced to life in prison in Alexandria, Virginia.
- 2007: British girl Madeleine McCann is snatched from her bed in holiday apartment 5A of the Ocean Club Holiday Resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal.