Happy Birthday to me...

Thanks to the NYT and my mother-in-law for the the following list of "other things that happened on May 3rd...other than my birth:

N.B. Missing from the following is that it is also the birthday of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, b. 1469 (which is also the last four digits of Lux Mentis' phone number...as I like to point out to bewildered tele-marketers).

On this date in:

1802 Washington, D.C., was incorporated.

1898 Israeli founder and prime minister Golda Meir was born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine.

1916 Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two others were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter uprising.

1921 West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.

1936 Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio made his major league debut with the New York Yankees.

1937 Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel "Gone with the Wind."

1948 The Supreme Court ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities were legally unenforceable.

1960 The musical "The Fantasticks" opened off-Broadway, beginning a record run of nearly 42 years and 17,162 performances.

1979 Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister as the Tories ousted the incumbent Labor government in parliamentary elections.

1988 The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy Reagan had used astrological advice to help schedule President Ronald Reagan's activities.

2000 The archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor, died at age 80.

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.

2005 Iraq's first democratically elected government was sworn in.

2006 A federal jury in Alexandria, Va., rejected the death penalty for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, deciding he should spend life in prison for his role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

2007 Astronaut Wally Schirra died at age 84.