George Gordon, Lord Byron, swims across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey now called the Dardanelles. Legendary Greek hero Leander supposedly swam the same four-mile stretch. Byron’s visits to Greece later made him a passionate supporter of Greek independence from Turkey. The 22-year-old Byron was taking an extended tour of the European continent when […]

On May 3, 1942, during World War II, the first modern naval engagement in history, the Battle of the Coral Sea, begins. A Japanese invasion force succeeds in occupying Tulagi of the Solomon Islands in an expansion of Japan’s defensive perimeter. The United States, having broken Japan’s secret war code and forewarned of an impending […]

On May 3, 1947, Japan’s postwar constitution goes into effect. The progressive constitution granted universal suffrage, stripped Emperor Hirohito of all but symbolic power, stipulated a bill of rights, abolished peerage, and outlawed Japan’s right to make war. The document was largely the work of Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur and his occupation staff, who […]

On May 3, 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, et al., the government’s long-running antitrust lawsuit against Paramount Pictures and seven other major Hollywood movie studios. The forerunner of the case was a 1928 antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission against the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (the forerunner […]

A ski-modified U.S. Air Force C-47 piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma and Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict of California is among the first aircraft to land on the North Pole. A moment later, Fletcher climbed out of the plane and walked to the exact geographic North Pole, probably the first person […]

Two commuter trains and a freight train collide near Tokyo, Japan, killing more than 160 people and injuring twice that number on May 3, 1962. It was Constitution Day in Japan when a commuter train pulled out of Mikawashima station at 9:30 p.m. taking passengers out of Tokyo. Three miles north of the city, a […]

On May 3, 1968, students at Paris’s Sorbonne University stage a large demonstration calling for more rights and an end to the conflict in Vietnam. Several hundred students were arrested and dozens were injured. By the end of the month, millions of workers were on strike, and France seemed to be on the brink of […]

Exxon executive Sidney Reso dies in a storage vault in New Jersey. Four days earlier, he was abducted from the driveway of his Morris Township, New Jersey, home. Reso was shot in the arm, bound and gagged, and then placed in a wooden box that was hidden in a virtually airless storage space. Despite his […]