Events on June 17 50
Year 1244
Following the Disputation of Paris, twenty-four carriage loads of Jewish religious manuscripts were burnt in Paris.
Year 1462
Vlad III the Impaler attempts to assassinate Mehmed II (The Night Attack) forcing him to retreat from Wallachia.
Year 1497
Battle of Deptford Bridge: Forces under King Henry VII defeat troops led by Michael An Gof.
Year 1579
Sir Francis Drake claims a land he calls Nova Albion (modern California) for England.
Year 1596
The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz discovers the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen.
Year 1631
Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, will spend the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
Year 1673
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course.
Year 1767
Samuel Wallis, an English sea captain, sights Tahiti and is considered the first European to reach the island.
Year 1775
American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Year 1795
The burghers of Swellendam expel the Dutch East India Company magistrate and declare a republic.
Year 1839
In the Kingdom of Hawaii, Kamehameha III issues the edict of toleration which gives Roman Catholics the freedom to worship in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaii Catholic Church and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace are established as a result.
Year 1843
The Wairau Affray, the first serious clash of arms between Māori and British settlers in the New Zealand Wars, takes place.
Year 1876
American Indian Wars: Battle of the Rosebud: One thousand five hundred Sioux and Cheyenne led by Crazy Horse beat back General George Crook's forces at Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory.
Year 1877
American Indian Wars: Battle of White Bird Canyon: The Nez Perce defeat the U.S. Cavalry at White Bird Canyon in the Idaho Territory.
Year 1900
Boxer Rebellion: Allied Western and Japanese forces capture the Taku Forts in Tianjin, China.
Year 1901
The College Board introduces its first standardized test, the forerunner to the SAT.
Year 1922
Portuguese naval aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral complete the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic.
Year 1929
The town of Murchison, New Zealand Is rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killing 17. At the time it was New Zealand's worst natural disaster.
Year 1932
Bonus Army: Around a thousand World War I veterans amass at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Senate considers a bill that would give them certain benefits.
Year 1933
Union Station massacre: In Kansas City, Missouri, four FBI agents and captured fugitive Frank Nash are gunned down by gangsters attempting to free Nash.
Year 1939
Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison.
Year 1940
World War II: RMS Lancastria is attacked and sunk by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France. At least 3,000 are killed in Britain's worst maritime disaster.
Year 1940
World War II: The British Army's 11th Hussars assault and take Fort Capuzzo in Libya, Africa from Italian forces.
Year 1940
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
Year 1948
A Douglas DC-6 carrying United Airlines Flight 624 crashes near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, killing all 43 people on board.
Year 1953
East Germany Workers Uprising: In East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
Year 1958
The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, in the process of being built to connect Vancouver and North Vancouver (Canada), collapses into the Burrard Inlet killing many of the ironworkers and injuring others.
Year 1960
The Nez Perce tribe is awarded $4 million for 7 million acres (28,000 km2) of land undervalued at four cents/acre in the 1863 treaty.
Year 1963
The United States Supreme Court rules 8-1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools.
Year 1963
A day after South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm announced the Joint Communiqué to end the Buddhist crisis, a riot involving around 2,000 people breaks out. One person is killed.
Year 1967
The People's Republic of China announces a successful test of its first thermonuclear weapon.
Year 1972
Watergate scandal: Five White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
Year 1985
STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery launches carrying Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a payload specialist.
Year 1987
With the death of the last individual of the species, the dusky seaside sparrow becomes extinct.
Year 1991
Apartheid: The South African Parliament repeals the Population Registration Act which required racial classification of all South Africans at birth.
Year 1992
A "joint understanding" agreement on arms reduction is signed by U.S. President George Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin (this would be later codified in START II).
Year 1994
Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Year 2015
Nine people are killed in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Year 2017
A series of wildfires in central Portugal kill at least 64 people and injure 204 others.