August 3 ...

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on a voyage that took him to the present-day Americas. In 1914 Germany declared war on France. In 1923 Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th president of the United States, following the death of Warren G. Harding. In 1936 the State Department urged Americans in Spain to leave because of that country's civil war. In 1943 Gen. George S. Patton slapped a private at an army hospital in Sicily, accusing him of cowardice. (Patton was later ordered by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to apologize for this and a second, similar episode.) In 1958 the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. In 1980 closing ceremonies were held in Moscow for the Summer Olympic Games, which had been boycotted by dozens of countries, including the United States. In 1981 US air traffic controllers went on strike, despite a warning from President Reagan they would be fired, which they were. In 1993 the Senate voted 96-3 to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1994 Stephen G. Breyer was sworn in as the Supreme Court's newest justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's Vermont summer home. In 1995 a Palestinian, Eyad Ismoil, was flown to the US from Jordan to face charges he'd driven a bomb-laden van into New York's World Trade Center. (The 1993 explosion killed six people and injured more than 1,000; Ismoil is serving a life sentence.) In 2000 George W. Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention in Philadelphia. In 2004 the Statue of Liberty re-opened to the public after being closed since the 9/11 attacks; also on this day, NASA launched the spacecraft Messenger, which after a 6 1/2-year journey was planned to arrive at the planet Mercury in March 2011.