Today is Thursday, July 17, the 198th day of 2014. There are 167 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 17, 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.
On this date:
In 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
In 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the
Second Spanish Republic.
In 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."
In 1954, the two-day inaugural Newport Jazz Festival, billed as "The First American Jazz
Festival," opened in Rhode Island.
In 1955, Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California.
In 1962, the United States conducted its last atmospheric nuclear test to date, detonating a 20-kiloton
device, codenamed Little Feller I, at the Nevada Test Site.
In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of
its kind.
In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York,
shortly after leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people aboard.