TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUG 17
1590 Governor of Roanoke Island colony, John White, returns from England to find no trace of the colonists he had left there 3 years earlier [or Aug 18, 1591]
1743 By the Treaty of Abo, Sweden cedes southeast Finland to Russia, ending Sweden’s failed war with Russia.
1790 The capital city of the U.S. moved to Philadelphia from New York City.
1833 The first steam ship to cross the Atlantic entirely on its own power, the Canadian ship Royal William, begins her journey from Nova Scotia to The Isle of Wight.
1863 Union gunboats attack Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, for the first time.
1877 Asaph Hall discovers Mars’ moon Phobos
1903 Joe Pulitzer donates $1 million to Columbia University & begins the Pulitzer Prizes in America
1915 Mob lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank in Cobb County, Ga after death sentence for murder of 13-year-old girl commuted to life
1944 The mayor of Paris, Pierre Charles Tattinger, meets with the German commander Dietrich von Choltitz to protest the explosives being deployed throughout the city.
1945 Indonesian nationalists proclaimed independence from the Netherlands.
1960 Gabon gains independence from the French
1962 18-year-old Peter Fechter was shot and killed by guards at the Berlin Wall, spurring riots.
1982 The U.S. Senate approved an immigration bill that granted permanent resident status to illegal aliens who had arrived in the United States before 1977.
1987 93-year-old Rudolf Hess, former Nazi leader and deputy of Adolf Hitler, is found hanged to death in Spandau Prison.
1988 Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq is killed in an airplane crash suspected of being an assassination.
1996 Ross Perot was announced to be the Reform Party’s presidential candidate. It was the party’s first-ever candidate.
1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal: US President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony he had an “improper physical relationship” with the intern and on the same day admits before the nation he “misled people” about the relationship
2005 Israel begins the first forced evacuation of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank, as part of a unilateral disengagement plan.
2012 Moscow’s top court upholds ban of gay pride events in Russia’s capital city for 100 years.
2017 The first observation of a collision of two neutron stars took place.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
