July 17 is:
Peach Ice Cream Day
Yellow Pig Day
From Days of the Year:
Yellow Pig Day originated in the 1960s when two math students from Princeton spent a long time obsessively analysing the number 17. It seems that they went a little mad eventually. They decided to invent the concept of a yellow pig with 17 toes, 17 teeth, and so forth. Now Yellow Pig Day is an important part of the academic calendar. It is celebrated with cake, carols, parades and general revelry.
In the year 180 AD – Twelve inhabitants of Scillium in North Africa were executed for being Christians. This is the earliest record of Christianity in that part of the world.
1717 – King George I of Great Britain sailed down the River Thames with a barge of 50 musicians. George Frideric Handel’s Water Music was premiered.
Members of the French National Guard under the command of General Lafayette, opened fire on a crowd of radical Jacobins in Paris in 1791. As many as 50 people were killed.
Spain ceded Florida to the United States on this date in 1821.
July 17, 1898, during the Spanish American War, Spaniards surrendered to US at Santiago, Cuba
1917 – King George V issued a Proclamation stating that the male line descendants of the British Royal Family will henceforth bear the surname, Windsor. With the country at war with Germany, the British royal family changed its name from the German Saxe-Coburg Gotha .
July 17, 1918: The Romanov family of Tsar Nicholas II was executed by the Bolsheviks in Russia.
Birthday of Gordon Gould (July 17, 1920), American physicist who coined the word “laser” from “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”.
1938 – Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn to fly the “wrong way” to Ireland and becomes known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.
World War II: the main three leaders of the Allied nations, Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Harry S. Truman of the U.S. and Joseph Stalin of The Soviet Union, met in the German city of Potsdam on July 17, 1945. The conference was to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
Southern Democrats opposed to the party’s position on civil rights, met in Birmingham, Ala. They endorsed South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond for president in 1948.
1955 – Disneyland was dedicated and opened by Walt Disney in Anaheim, California.