Today's Highlights in History
On July 17, 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower linkup of its kind.
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.
On this date in:
1821 - Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
1898 - Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered to U.S. forces during the Spanish-American War.
1900 - Hall of fame pitcher Christy Mathewson made his major league debut with the New York Giants.
1917 - With the country at war with Germany, the British royal family changed its name from the German Saxe-Coburg Gotha to Windsor.
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.
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.
1979 - Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza resigned and fled into exile in Miami.
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.
1997 - Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 five-and-dime stores, laying off 9,200 employees.
2000 - Bashar Assad, son of Hafez Assad, became Syria's 16th head of state.
2004 - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger mockingly used the term "girlie men" during a rally as he claimed Democrats were delaying the state budget by catering to special interests.
2005 - The Iraqi Special Tribunal filed its first criminal case against Saddam Hussein for a 1982 massacre of Shiites.
2007 - Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury in Richmond, Va., on charges related to competitive dogfighting.