GMT 7/17/2017

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.

1785 France limits the importation of goods from Britain.

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.

1801 The U.S. fleet arrives in Tripoli.

1815 Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders to the British at Rochefort, France.

1821 Andrew Jackson becomes the governor of Florida.

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.

1898 U.S. troops under General William R. Shafter take Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

1944 Field Marshall Erwin Rommel is wounded when an Allied fighter strafes his staff car in France.

1946 Chinese communists attack the Nationalist army on the Yangtze River.

1960 American pilot Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty to spying charges in a Moscow court.

1966 Ho Chi Minh orders a partial mobilization of North Vietnam to defend against American airstrikes.

1987 Lt. Col. Oliver North and Rear Adm. John Poindexter begin testifying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra scandal.

Born on July 17

1674 Isaac Watts, English minister and hymn writer.

1763 John Jacob Astor, American fur trader and entrepreneur.