May 3 in History

West Virginia enacted the first state sales tax in American history on May 3, 1921, imposing a gross sales tax on businesses. The implementation was plagued with collection difficulties, as merchants resisted the new levy and enforcement mechanisms were rudimentary. The tax survived legal challenges and became a model that other states studied during the Great Depression, when collapsing property tax revenues forced governments to find alternative revenue sources. Mississippi adopted its own sales tax in 1930, and by 1940, 28 states had followed. Today, 45 states and the District of Columbia impose sales taxes, generating roughly one-third of state tax revenue nationwide. West Virginia's pioneering experiment proved that consumption taxes could provide stable revenue even during economic downturns.

The Potsdam Declaration, issued on July 26, 1945, demanded Japan's unconditional surrender and outlined terms for postwar governance, though General Douglas MacArthur did not arrive to implement them until September 2. The Japanese constitution that MacArthur's staff drafted in one week included Article 9, which renounced war and prohibited Japan from maintaining military forces. Emperor Hirohito accepted a purely ceremonial role. The occupation transformed Japan from a militarist empire into a parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage, land reform, dissolution of the zaibatsu industrial conglomerates, and a reformed education system. The occupation lasted until 1952, but its constitutional and institutional changes remain the foundation of modern Japanese governance.

The Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer on May 3, 1948, that while private parties could create racially restrictive covenants, state courts could not enforce them because doing so would constitute state action violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The case involved J. D. Shelley, a Black man who purchased a house in St. Louis that was subject to a 1911 covenant barring "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race." The Kraemers, white neighbors, sued to void the sale. The Court's decision did not invalidate the covenants themselves, only their judicial enforcement. The practical effect was significant: without court enforcement, restrictive covenants became unenforceable. The FHA subsequently declared them contrary to public policy, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned them outright.

Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female prime minister on May 4, 1979, after the Conservative Party won 339 seats in the general election, defeating James Callaghan's Labour government which had been weakened by the "Winter of Discontent" strikes. Thatcher governed for eleven and a half years, the longest continuous premiership since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. Her economic policies, including privatization of state-owned industries, deregulation of financial markets, and confrontation with trade unions culminating in the 1984-85 miners' strike, fundamentally restructured the British economy. She won the Falklands War in 1982, survived an IRA assassination attempt in 1984, and was eventually forced out by her own party in November 1990.

William Shakespeare died around April 23, 1616 — dates are uncertain because he died shortly before England switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and some sources list the date as May 3. He'd been retired in Stratford for three or four years. He left a careful will that gave his daughter Susanna the bulk of his estate, his daughter Judith some cash and silver, and his wife Anne the 'second-best bed,' which some scholars read as an insult and others as sentimental — it would have been the marital bed, the best one being reserved for guests. He was buried inside Holy Trinity Church. The inscription on his grave warns against moving his bones. Nobody has.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 3, 1937, just eleven months after its publication. The novel had sold one million copies in its first six months, a record at the time. Mitchell spent ten years writing the 1,037-page epic about Scarlett O'Hara and the destruction of the plantation South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The 1939 film adaptation, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, became the highest-grossing movie ever made (adjusted for inflation, it still holds that record). The novel has been both celebrated as a sweeping historical romance and criticized for its romanticized portrayal of slavery and the antebellum South, with its depiction of enslaved people as loyal and content drawing particular condemnation.

Dave Ulmer, a GPS enthusiast and computer consultant, hid a black bucket containing a logbook, pencils, and small prizes in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon, on May 3, 2000, and posted the GPS coordinates on the sci.geo.satellite-nav Usenet group with the message "The Great American GPS Stash Hunt." Within three days, two people had found it. By September, the hobby had a name, geocaching, coined by Matt Stum. The concept exploited the recent removal of Selective Availability, which had deliberately degraded civilian GPS accuracy. With coordinates now accurate to within ten meters, hiding containers and sharing locations became practical. Today there are over 3 million active geocaches in 191 countries, with players logging finds through a dedicated app and website.

He was 21 when he conquered Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire and a thousand years of Roman succession. Mehmed the Conqueror had tried before at 18 and failed. He came back three years later with a fleet of 126 ships and an army of 80,000. The city fell on May 29, 1453. He then spent the rest of his reign building an empire from the Aegean to the Black Sea. He died in 1481 at 49, probably poisoned. His personal library held works in six languages.