Browse Historical Events by Day: What Happened on August 3rd?

Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, with three ships, Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. Searching for a westerly route to the Far East. Instead, on October 12th, he lands in the Bahamas, thinking it was an outlying Japanese island. More

During a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Whittaker Chambers, American writer and intelligence agent, accuses former State Department official Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. Hiss denied the accusation but was eventually tried and convicted of perjury. More

The USS Nautilus, the first U.S. nuclear submarine, reaches the geographic North Pole traveling 1000 miles under sea from Point Barrow, Alaska and then on to Iceland, pioneering a new and shorter route from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Europe. More

Niger Independence Day - Effective date of the agreement with France signed on 11 July.

A 707 passenger flight chartered by the national airline of Morocco, Royal Air Maroc, flying in heavy fog crashed into a mountain on approach to Agadir Inezgane, Airport in Morocco. All 188 passengers and crew on board were killed. The cause of the crash was determined to be pilot error. More