Machiavelli, Spam Email, and the Strongest Tornado Ever — it's May 3.

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Niccolò Machiavelli was born today in Florence, the city that would give him everything he needed to understand how power actually works — as opposed to how rulers claimed it worked. He watched princes rise, alliances collapse, and virtue lose to strategy with sufficient regularity to draw conclusions. The Prince was not a manual for tyrants. It was a description of what he had observed. That distinction has been argued ever since, which may itself be the most Machiavellian outcome possible.

Mehmed II — the Ottoman sultan who ended the Byzantine Empire in 1453 — died today at age forty-nine, likely of gout, possibly of poison, depending on which historian you trust. He had spent the last years of his reign consolidating an empire and preparing an invasion of Italy. His death stopped it cold. Europe, which had been watching with considerable anxiety, exhaled.

The College of Philadelphia established America's first medical school today, training physicians in a country where the practice had previously been conducted largely by barbers, clergy, and optimists. The founders modeled it on Edinburgh. The graduates would go on to train the doctors who treated a young nation through revolution, epidemic, and expansion. It eventually became the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Many consequential institutions begin in a single room with a handful of people who think the current situation is unacceptable.

Poland adopted its Constitution today — the first in Europe and the second written national constitution in world history, trailing only the United States by four years. It was a remarkable document: enlightened, deliberate, and tragically timed. Within a year, Russia and Prussia moved against it. By 1795, Poland had been partitioned out of existence entirely, not reappearing on European maps for 123 years. The constitution outlasted the country that wrote it, which is either inspiring or heartbreaking depending on your disposition.

Washington D.C. was incorporated as a city today, giving formal municipal structure to a place that had existed largely as a plan, a swamp, and an argument. Pierre Charles L'Enfant had designed grand boulevards connecting buildings that hadn't been built yet. The incorporation was the bureaucratic acknowledgment that someone needed to be responsible for making it functional. A century later it would be one of the most recognized cities on earth. In 1802 it had unpaved roads and approximately eight thousand residents.

Margaret Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today for Gone With the Wind, a novel she had spent ten years writing in an Atlanta apartment while recovering from a car accident. She had told almost no one it existed. The book sold a million copies in its first six months, making her one of the most famous people in America essentially overnight. She spent the rest of her life managing the fame she hadn't asked for and writing almost nothing else. Some books don't leave room for a second act.

Japan's postwar constitution took effect today, drafted under American occupation and ratified by a Japanese legislature that understood the context. Article 9 renounced war as a sovereign right — one of the most unusual clauses in the history of constitutional law. Whether it was imposed or embraced remains debated. What is less debated: Japan rebuilt itself into the world's second-largest economy over the following decades without firing a shot in anger. The clause held. The country flourished. The relationship between the two facts is worth sitting with.

As anti-Vietnam War protests intensified, the Nixon administration arrested more than 12,000 demonstrators in Washington today — the largest mass arrest in American history. Most were held in makeshift detention facilities, including the practice field of the Washington Redskins. Most charges were eventually dropped. The protesters had attempted to shut down the city. The government's response was to detain everyone in the vicinity, sort it out later, and hope the courts moved slowly. They did.

Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an unsolicited commercial message to 393 users on ARPANET today — the first spam email in recorded history. The recipients were annoyed. The ARPANET administrator sent a formal reprimand. DEC claimed the responses generated enough sales to justify the experiment. Thuerk has since described himself as the "father of spam" with apparent pride. Every inbox on earth has been paying for that decision ever since.

An F5 tornado struck the Oklahoma City metro area today, producing the highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth's surface at the time — 302 miles per hour, measured by Doppler radar near Bridge Creek. The storm killed 36 people, injured 583, and destroyed more than 8,000 homes. The death toll was kept lower than it might have been by improved warning systems and a population that had learned to take sirens seriously. The storm did not care either way.

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