History of the Day for:
December 3
- 1586: Sir Thomas Herriot introduced potatoes to England from Colombia.
- 1621: Galileo invented the telescope.
- 1639: The first annulment by court decree was passed.
- 1775: The first official U.S. flag raising took place aboard naval vessel Alfred.
- 1818: Illinois was admitted as the 21st state of the union.
- 1828: Andrew Jackson was elected the 7th President of the United States.
- 1835: The first fire insurance policy was issued by Manufacturer Mutual Fire Insurance Company in Rhode Island.
- 1868: The trial of Jefferson Davis started, marking the first U.S. trial with blacks included in the jury.
- 1910: Neon lighting, developed by French physicist Georges Claude, made its public debut at the Paris Motor Show.
- 1922: The first successful technicolor motion picture, "The Tall of the Sea," was shown at the Rialto Theater in New York City.
- 1923: The first Congressional open session is broadcast via radio in Washington, D.C.
- 1931: Alka Seltzer made its debut on the market.
- 1947: The Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway. It starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski.
- 1950: Paul Harvey began his national radio broadcast.
- 1961: The Beatles met future manager Brian Epstein for the first time in his Liverpool record store.
- 1962: Edith Spurlock Sampson was sworn in as the first American black woman judge.
- 1964: Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in.
- 1964: "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" first aired on television.
- 1965: The Beatles began their final U.K. concert tour in Glasgow.
- 1967: The "Twentieth Century Limited," the famed luxury train, completed its final run from New York to Chicago; A team of surgeons in South Africa, headed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the new heart.
- 1968: Major League Baseball reduced the height of pitcher's mound from 15 inches to 10 inches in an attempt to improve scoring. The strike zone was also reduced from the knees to the shoulders to the top of the knees to the armpits.
- 1971: President Nixon commuted Jimmy Hoffa's jail term.
- 1979: Eleven people died when thousands of rock fans jammed the entrances to get to unreserved seats at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati for a concert by The Who.
- 1982: A soil sample is taken from Times Beach, Missouri that will be found to contain 300 times the safe level of dioxin.
- 1984: Bhopal Disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
- 1989: Cold War: In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the cold war between their nations may be coming to an end (some commentators from both nations exaggerated the wording and independently declared the Cold War over).
- 1990: At Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Northwest Airlines Flight 1482 collides with Northwest Airlines Flight 299 on the runway, killing 7 passengers and 1 crew member aboard flight 1482.
- 1992: UN Security Council Resolution 794 is unanimously passed, approving a coalition of United Nations peacekeepers led by the United States to form UNITAF, with the task of establishing peace and ensuring that humanitarian aid is distributed in Somalia.
- 1992: The Greek oil tanker Aegean Sea, carrying 80,000 tonnes of crude oil, runs aground in a storm while approaching La Coruña, Spain, and spills much of its cargo.
- 1997: In Ottawa, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign a treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United States, People's Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty, however.
- 1999; NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.
- 2005: XCOR Aerospace makes first manned rocket aircraft delivery of US Mail in Mojave, California.
- 2007: Winter storms caused the Chehalis River to flood many cities in Lewis County, Washington, also closing a 20-mile portion of Interstate 5 for several days. At least eight deaths and billions of dollars in damages are blamed on the floods.