Following are some of the major events to have occurred on July 17:
1903 – The American-born artist James Whistler, best known for the portrait of his mother, died.
1945 – The post-World War Two Potsdam Conference began, bringing together British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman.
1959 – Billie Holiday, jazz and blues singer, died.
1969 – In Spain, Generalisimo Francisco Franco named Prince Juan Carlos as his eventual successor as head of state.
1973 – A military coup in Afghanistan led by former prime minister Sardar Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew King Mohammed Zahir Shah; a republic was proclaimed with Daoud as president.
1995 – Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina, five times world motor racing champion, died.
1996 – TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean after taking off from New York en route for Paris. All 230 people on board died.
2000 – Bashar al-Assad was formally sworn in as president of Syria, taking up the office his late father, Hafez al-Assad, had held for the previous three decades.
2005 – Former British prime minister Edward Heath, who took Britain into the forerunner of the European Union during his term in office in the early 1970s, died aged 89.
2009 – Legendary U.S. broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite dies.
2014 – Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane crashes in Donetsk region, killing all 295 people aboard.
