TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: July 17
180 6 inhabitants of Carthage, North Africa executed for being Christians. Earliest record of Christianity in this part of the world.
1203 Siege of Constantinople begins during the fourth Crusade, Crusaders abroad a Venetian fleet attack the city
1453 France defeats England at Castillon, France, ending the Hundred Years’ War.
1762 Peter III of Russia is murdered and his wife, Catherine II, takes the throne.
1775 1st military hospital approved
1791 National Guard troops open fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Paris.
1799 Ottoman forces, supported by the British, capture Aboukir, Egypt from the French.
1815 Napoleon Bonaparte surrendered to the British at Rochefort, France.
1821 Andrew Jackson becomes the governor of Florida.
1850 Harvard Observatory takes 1st photograph of a star (Vega)
1862 National cemeteries were authorized by the U.S. government.
1864 Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaces General Joseph E. Johnston with General John Bell Hood in hopes of defeating Union General William T. Sherman outside Atlanta.
1917 The British royal family changed its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor amid anti-German sentiment during World War I.
1936 Spanish generals Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola lead a right-wing uprising, starting the Spanish Civil War
1938 “Wrong Way Corrigan” took off from New York, purportedly aiming for California and landing in Ireland.
1941 Brigadier General Soervell directed Architect G. Edwin Bergstrom to have basic plans and architectural perspectives for an office building that could house 40,000 War Department employees on his desk by the following Monday morning. The building became known as the Pentagon.
1944 Field Marshall Erwin Rommel is wounded when an Allied fighter strafes his staff car in France.
1945 Potsdam Conference: Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill hold 1st post-World War II meeting
1955 Arco, Idaho becomes 1st US city lit by nuclear power
1955 Disneyland opens its doors for the first time
1960 American pilot Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty to spying charges in a Moscow court.
1975 The American Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft linked up for the first time.
1976 ABA merges into the NBA
1987 Lt. Col. Oliver North and Rear Adm. John Poindexter begin testifying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra scandal.
1989 The Stealth Bomber makes its debut. The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit made its first public flight from Palmdale, California.
1990 Hussein’s Revolutionary Day speech claims Kuwait stole oil from Iraq
1997 After 117 years, the Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 stores.
1998 The Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) is adopted
1998 The last Russian Czar Nicholas II was buried 80 years after he and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down over Eastern Ukraine by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
