April 3 is the 93rd day of the year (94th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 272 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Wednesday or Thursday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Saturday (56).
Holidays
Christian feast day:
- Agape, Chionia, and Irene
- Mary of Egypt (Roman Catholic)
- Richard of Chichester, Bishop, 1253 (Anglicanism)
- April 3 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
History
In 503 BC, According to the Fasti Triumphales, Roman consul Publius Postumius Tubertus celebrated an ovation for a military victory over the Sabines.
In 686, Maya king Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ assumes the crown of Calakmul.
In 1043, Edward the Confessor is crowned King of England.
In 1077, The first Parliament of Friuli is created.
In 1513, explorer Juan Ponce de Leon claimed Florida for Spain. On April 2, 1513, his ship sighted land which Ponce de León believed was another island. He named it La Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). The following day they came ashore to seek information and take possession of this new land. The precise location of their landing on the Florida coast has been disputed for many years.
In 1559, The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis treaty is signed, ending the Italian Wars.
In 1776, Future president George Washington received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Harvard College.
In 1834, The generals in the Greek War of Independence stand trial for treason.
In 1860, The first successful United States Pony Express run from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, begins. It will take riders eight days to complete the treacherous 2,000-mile delivery route. The service lasted only 1-1/2 years before giving way to the transcontinental telegraph.
In 1865, American Civil War: Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America.
In 1882, American Old West: Jesse James is killed by Robert Ford. Jesse James was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Scholars place him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of frontier lawlessness or alleged economic justice.
Jesse and his brother Frank James were Confederate guerrillas or Bushwhackers during the Civil War. They were accused of participating in atrocities committed against Union soldiers, including the Centralia Massacre. After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, they robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Despite popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang shared their loot from the robberies they committed. The James brothers were most active with their gang from about 1866 until 1876, when their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota resulted in the capture or deaths of several gang members. They continued in crime for several years, recruiting new members, but were under increasing pressure from law enforcement. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was killed by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford, who hoped to collect a reward on James’ head.
In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler is granted a German patent for his engine design.
In 1888, The first of eleven unsolved brutal murders of women committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London, occurs.
In 1895, The trial in the libel case brought by Oscar Wilde begins, eventually resulting in his imprisonment on charges of homosexuality.
In 1922, Joseph Stalin becomes the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1929, RMS Queen Mary is ordered from John Brown & Company Shipbuilding and Engineering by Cunard Line.
In 1933, First flight over Mount Everest, a British expedition, led by the Marquis of Clydesdale, and funded by Lucy, Lady Houston.
In 1933, first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt informed newspaper reporters that beer would be served at the White House. This followed the March 22 legislation legalizing “3.2” beer.
In 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., the baby son of pilot Charles Lindbergh.
In 1942, World War II: Japanese forces begin an assault on the United States and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula.
In 1943, Conrad Veidt, German-American actor (b. 1893) dies of a massive heart attack while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. He was a German-born British actor best remembered for his roles in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Man Who Laughs (1928), The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Casablanca (1942). After a successful career in German silent film, where he was one of the best-paid stars of Ufa, he left Germany in 1933 with his new Jewish wife after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Britain, where he participated in a number of films before emigrating to the United States around 1941. Veidt fervently opposed the Nazi regime and donated, even while making American films, a major portion of his personal fortune to Britain to assist in the war effort. Soon after it took power, Joseph Goebbels started to “purge” the film industry of liberals and Jews. In 1933, a week after Veidt’s marriage to Illona Prager, a Jewish woman, the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them. There he perfected his English and became a British citizen in 1938. In the early 1940s, he and Ilona moved to Hollywood, California. Before leaving the United Kingdom, Veidt gave his life savings to the British government to help finance the war effort. Realizing that Hollywood would most likely typecast him in Nazi roles, he had his contract mandate that they must always be villains.
In 1944, Supreme Court (Smith v Allwright) “white primaries” unconstitutional. Smith v. Allwright , 321 U.S. 649 (1944), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation. It overturned the Texas state law that authorized the Democratic Party to set its internal rules, including the use of white primaries. The court ruled that the state had allowed discrimination to be practiced by delegating its authority to the Democratic Party. This affected all other states where the party used the rule.
The Democrats had excluded minority voter participation by this means, another device for legal disenfranchisement of blacks across the South beginning in the late 19th century.
In 1946, Japanese Lt. General Masaharu Homma is executed in the Philippines for leading the Bataan Death March.
In 1948, United States President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.
In 1948, In Jeju Province, South Korea, a civil-war-like period of violence and human rights abuses begins, known as the Jeju massacre.
In 1949, The North Atlantic Treaty, which calls for a mutual defense pact between the U.S., Great Britain, France and Canada, is signed.
The treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949 by a committee which was chaired by US diplomat Theodore Achilles. Earlier secret talks had been held at the Pentagon between 22 March and 1 April 1948, of which Achilles said:
The talks lasted about two weeks and by the time they finished, it had been secretly agreed that there would be a treaty, and I had a draft of one in the bottom drawer of my safe. It was never shown to anyone except Jack [Hickerson]. I wish I had kept it, but when I left the Department in 1950, I dutifully left it in the safe and I have never been able to trace it in the archives. It drew heavily on the Rio Treaty, and a bit of the Brussels Treaty, which had not yet been signed, but of which we were being kept heavily supplied with drafts. The eventual North Atlantic Treaty had the general form, and a good bit of the language of my first draft, but with a number of important differences
In 1955, The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg‘s book Howl against obscenity charges.
In 1956, Hudsonville–Standale tornado: The western half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan is struck by a deadly F5 tornado.
In 1961, The Leadbeater’s possum is rediscovered in Australia after 72 years.
In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.
In 1969, Vietnam War: United States Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces that the United States will start to “Vietnamize” the war effort.
In 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, though it took ten years for the DynaTAC 8000X to become the first such phone to be commercially released.
In 1974, The Super Outbreak occurs, the second biggest tornado outbreak in recorded history (after the April 25–28, 2011 tornado outbreak). The death toll is 315, with nearly 5,500 injured.
In 1975, Bobby Fischer refuses to play in a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, giving Karpov the title of World Champion by default.
In 1981, The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco.
In 1981, Juan Trippe, American businessman, founded Pan American World Airways (b. 1899) dies. He was an American airline entrepreneur and pioneer, and the founder of Pan American World Airways, one of the world’s most prominent airlines of the twentieth century. After graduation from Yale, Trippe began working on Wall Street, but soon became bored. In 1922 he raised money from his old Yale classmates, selling them stock in his new airline, which he called Long Island Airways, an air-taxi service for the rich and powerful. Once again tapping his wealthy friends from Yale, Trippe invested in an airline named Colonial Air Transport, which was awarded a new route and an airmail contract on October 7, 1925. Interested in operating to the Caribbean, Trippe created the Aviation Corporation of the Americas. Based in Florida, the company would evolve into the unofficial US flag carrier, Pan American Airways, commonly known as Pan Am.
In 1986, the U.S. national debt hit the $2,000,000,000,000 mark.
In 1989, Richard M. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago, the post his father had held for 21 years.
In 1996, Suspected “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski is captured at his cabin in Montana, United States.
In 1996, A United States Air Force airplane carrying United States Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown crashes in Croatia, killing all 35 on board. Ron Brown was the United States Secretary of Commerce, serving during the first term of President Bill Clinton. He was the first man of color to hold this position. He was killed, along with 34 others, in a 1996 plane crash in Croatia.
In 1997, The Thalit massacre begins in Algeria; all but one of the 53 inhabitants of Thalit are killed by guerrillas.
In 2000, United States v. Microsoft Corp.: Microsoft is ruled to have violated United States antitrust law by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson also ruled that Microsoft violated another section of the law by “unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system” and could be sued under state anti-competition laws. “Microsoft has been held accountable for its illegal conduct by a court of law,” said Attorney General Janet Reno. The judgment sets up a new round of hearings to determine what punishment to impose on Microsoft, including the question of whether the huge company founded by Bill Gates should be broken up.
In 2004, Islamic terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombings are trapped by the police in their apartment and kill themselves.
In 2007, Conventional-Train World Speed Record: a French TGV train on the LGV Est high speed line sets an official new world speed record.
In 2008, ATA Airlines, once one of the ten largest U.S. passenger airlines and largest charter airline, files for bankruptcy for the second time in five years and ceases all operations.
In 2008, Texas law enforcement cordons off the FLDS‘s YFZ Ranch. Eventually 533 women and children will be removed and taken into state custody.
In 2009, Jiverly Antares Wong opens fire at an American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York, killing thirteen and wounding four before committing suicide.
In 2013, More than 50 people die in floods resulting from record-breaking rainfall in La Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In 2014, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, American guitarist, fiddler, and composer (b. 1921) dies. He was an American musician, songwriter, and producer of records, as well as a radio and TV host for decades. Smith produced radio and TV shows; The Arthur Smith Show was the first nationally syndicated country music show on television. After moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, Smith developed and ran the first commercial recording studio in the Southeast. Born in Clinton, South Carolina, Arthur Smith was a textile mill worker who became a celebrated and respected country music instrumental composer, guitarist, fiddler, and banjo player. His major hit was the instrumental “Guitar Boogie,” which he wrote and recorded in 1945. The song earned him the moniker Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith (to differentiate him from Tennessee fiddler and 1930s Grand Ole Opry star Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith). It was recorded by numerous other musicians, including Tommy Emmanuel, and became known around the world.
Renamed “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, it became a rock and roll hit by Frank Virtue and the Virtues. Virtue served in the Navy with Smith and counted him as a major influence. Other musicians who have been influenced by Smith include Nashville studio ace Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland, Roy Clark, Glen Campbell and surf music pioneers the Ventures. Smith was also noted for his “Feudin’ Banjos” (1955), which was also recorded by Lester Flatt. It was revived as “Dueling Banjos” and used as a theme song in the popular movie, Deliverance (1972). Released as a single, it became a hit, played on Top 40, AOR, and country stations alike. It reached the Top Ten and hit #1 in the US and Canada. Because he was not credited in the film for the song, Smith sued Warner Brothers, and gained a settlement. His name was added to the film credits for his piece, and he received a share of royalties.
In 2014, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the prestigious Ways and Means Committee, will not run for re-election in November, Politico reports. Washington Post: “The battle to succeed Camp at Ways and Means is a two-way race between Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the clear front-runner, and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), who is more senior on the panel than Ryan.”
In 2016, The Panama Papers, a leak of legal documents, reveals information on 214,488 offshore companies.
In 2017, A bomb explodes in the St Petersburg metro system, killing 14 and injuring several more people.
In 2018, YouTube headquarters shooting. The shooter was identified as 38-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, who entered through an exterior parking garage, approached an outdoor patio, and opened fire with a Smith & Wesson 9 mm caliber semi-automatic pistol. Aghdam wounded three people, one of them critically, before killing herself.