Some of the significant events which took place on July 17 taken from the leaf of History:
1489 – Nizam Shah is crowned Sultan of Delhi.
1821- Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
1918 – Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
1936 – The Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic.
1938 – Aviator Douglas Corrigan took off from New York, saying he was headed for California; he ended up in Ireland, supposedly by accident, earning the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan.”
1944 – During World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.
1954 – The two-day inaugural Newport Jazz Festival, billed as “The First American Jazz Festival,” opened in Rhode Island; among the performers the first night was Billie Holiday, who died in New York on this date in 1959 at age 44.
1955 – Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California.
1974 – Jay Prakash Narain leads an agitation for dissolution of Bihar State Legislative Assembly.
1975 – An Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.
1996 – TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.
1996 – M. Karunanidhi, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu announced in the state assembly that the state capital of Madras would be called Chennai from now onwards. The new name Chennai was derived from the name Chennaipattnam, a town near Fort St George which the British buiult in 1639.
1997 – Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing its 400 remaining five-and-dime stores across the country, ending 117 years in business.
2014 – All 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine.
2009 -The FDA lifted its salmonella warning on tomatoes amid signs the record outbreak, while not over and might finally be slowing. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (NOO’-ree ahl-MAHL’-ih-kee) held a secure video conference during which they agreed to set a “general time horizon” for bringing more U.S. troops home from the Iraq war.
2014 – In a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on domestic spying, members of Congress said they’d never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America, while top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe.
2018 – The latest Republican effort to repeal and replace “Obamacare” was dealt a fatal blow in the Senate when two more Republican senators announced their opposition to the measure. A white former Texas police officer, Roy Oliver, was indicted on a murder charge in the April shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was in a car with four other black teens. A Georgia jury said CSX Transportation should pay $3.9 million to the family of a movie worker killed on a railroad trestle in 2014 during the filming of a movie about musician Gregg Allman. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was released from a federal prison in Minnesota where he had served a little over a year for a banking conviction related to a child-sex-abuse scandal.
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