TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUGUST 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.
1787 Jews are granted permission in Budapest Hungary to pray in groups
1790 The capital city of the U.S. moved to Philadelphia from New York City.
1812 Napoleon Bonaparte’s army defeats the Russians at the Battle of Smolensk during the Russian retreat to Moscow.
1863 Union gunboats attack Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, for the first time.
1896 Prospectors found gold in Alaska, a discovery that set off the Klondike gold rush.
1915 Mob lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank in Cobb County, Ga after death sentence for murder of 13-year-old girl commuted to life
1943 Allied forces complete the conquest of Sicily.
1947 The Radcliffe Line, the border between Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan is revealed
1960 American Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty at his Moscow trial for spying over the Soviet Union in a U-2 plane.
1970 Launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Venera 7 became the first spacecraft to land on another planet, Venus, and send data back to Earth. It entered Venus’ atmosphere in December 1970.
1977 Florists Transworld Delivery (FTD) reported that in one day the number of orders for flowers to be delivered to Graceland had surpassed the number for any other event in the company’s history.
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.
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.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
