On This Day: July 17

Updated July 17, 2014, 9:28 am

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On July 17, 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower linkup of its kind.

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On July 17, 1899, James Cagney, the Academy-Award winning American film actor, was born. Following his death on March 30, 1986, his obituary appeared in The Times.

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On This Date

1821 Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
1898 Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered to U.S. forces during the Spanish-American War.
1917 With the country at war with Germany, the British royal family changed its name from the German Saxe-Coburg Gotha to Windsor.
1918 Russia's Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.
1945 President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.
1948 Southern Democrats opposed to the party's position on civil rights met in Birmingham, Ala., to endorse South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond for president.
1955 Disneyland opened in Anaheim, Calif.
1961 Baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb died at age 74.
1967 Jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane died at age 40.
1981 A pair of walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a dance, killing 114 people.
1996 TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 bound for Paris, exploded and crashed off Long Island, N.Y., shortly after leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport. All 230 people aboard were killed.
2000 Bashar Assad succeeded his late father, Hafez Assad, becoming Syria's 16th head of state.
2009 Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite died at age 92.

Historic Birthdays

73 William Gargan 7/17/1905 - 2/16/1979
American motion-picture and television actor
71 Georges Lemaitre 7/17/1894 - 6/20/1966
Belgian astronomer and cosmologist
80 Erle Stanley Gardner 7/17/1889 - 3/11/1970
American mystery novelist and lawyer
81 S. Y. Agnon 7/17/1888 - 2/17/1970
Israeli novelist and short-story writer
86 Ernest Rhys 7/17/1859 - 5/25/1946
English editor
90 Sir Erskine Holland 7/17/1835 - 5/24/1926
English legal scholar
84 John Jacob Astor 7/17/1763 - 3/29/1848
German-born American founder of the Astor dynasty
70 Elbridge Gerry 7/17/1744 - 11/23/1814
American Revolutionary leader and U.S. vice president (1813-14)
47 Alexander Baumgarten 7/17/1714 - 5/26/1762
German philosopher and educator