Today in History for May 17:
In 1630, the belts of the planet Jupiter were first observed.
In 1673, Fathers Marquette and Joliet set out across Lake Michigan to rediscover the Mississippi River and claim for France all the land and water they might discover.
In 1691, theologian Antoine Court was born. The French-speaking Swiss Protestant pastor and occultist initiated the public movement to interpret the Tarot as a repository of timeless esoteric wisdom. His most famous work "The Primitive World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World" includes his famous essay on Tarot.
In 1756, the Seven Year's War began when Britain declared war on France. The war resulted in the British conquest of New France.
In 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was founded.
In 1814, Norway's constitution was signed, providing for a limited monarchy.
In 1855, the city of Charlottetown was incorporated.
In 1861, the first package vacation for a popular market was arranged by Thomas Cook. The Whitsuntide Working Men's Excursion left London that day for a six-day trip to Paris.
In 1875, the first Kentucky Derby was run at Churchill Downs in Louisville. The winner was "Aristides."
In 1878, Canada's governor general and his wife, Lord and Lady Dufferin, were treated to a demonstration of Thomas Edison's recent invention, the phonograph, at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
In 1898, Group of Seven painter A.J. Casson was born in France.
In 1900, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's former spiritual leader, was born.
In 1916, the world's first daylight savings act was passed in Britain. Clocks were moved forward one hour the following Sunday.
In 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth arrived in Quebec City for the first visit to Canada by a reigning British sovereign.
In 1940, the German army occupied Brussels during the Second World War.
In 1947, The Conservative Baptist Association was formed in Atlantic City, N.J., after doctrinal disputes prompted a split within the liberal leaning American Baptist Association.
In 1948, the Soviet Union recognized the state of Israel.
In 1949, the Canadian government granted full recognition to the state of Israel.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously outlawed racial segregation in American public schools.
In 1963, Sgt.-Maj. Walter Leja, a Canadian army engineer, was seriously injured when a terrorist bomb blew up in his hands in Montreal. Three days later, police arrested 20 young members of the FLQ. Mario Bachand, 21, was sentenced to four years in prison for placing the bomb in a mailbox.
In 1973, the U.S. Senate Watergate committee began its hearings.
In 1975, 10 women broke the gender barrier in the Ontario Provincial Police force. They became the first women to begin training in the OPP's 65-year history.
In 1978, police in Lausanne, Switzerland, retrieved the body of comic actor Charlie Chaplin and charged two men with extortion. The body had been stolen from a graveyard 11 weeks earlier.
In 1982, negotiations resumed at the UN aimed at ending the fighting between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands.
In 1984, journalist-broadcaster Gordon Sinclair died in Toronto at age 83.
In 1987, a missile from an Iraqi warplane killed 37 sailors on the "USS Stark," a guided-missile frigate in the Persian Gulf. Iraq said it was an accident. But the U.S. blamed Iran because it refused to negotiate an end to its war with Iraq.
In 1992, pro-democracy protests began in Thailand. Officials said 44 people died in four days of clashes with troops, but activists maintained hundreds died.
In 1995, Hockey Hall of Fame player and coach Hector "Toe" Blake died in Montreal at age 82.
In 1999, David Milgaard accepted a $10 million compensation package from the Saskatchewan government for his wrongful conviction in the 1969 murder of a Saskatoon nursing aide. Milgaard, who spent more than two decades in prison, received the largest criminal compensation package in Canadian history.
In 2000, a team of University of Alberta doctors announced they had successfully transplanted human pancreatic cells into eight severely-diabetic patients, who began producing their own insulin immediately.
In 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage joining Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, along with the Netherlands and Belgium, as the only places worldwide where same-sex marriages were allowed.
In 2005, high-profile Tory MP Belinda Stronach defected to the federal Liberals and joined the cabinet as human resources minister. The move helped Prime Minister Martin's minority Liberal government survive a narrow budget vote in the Commons.
In 2005, British Columbia's Liberals won a second straight majority government under Premier Gordon Campbell, who became the first premier to win successive elections in B.C. in more than 20 years.
In 2006, Capt. Nichola Goddard, of the 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery based in Shilo, Man., was killed in action, 24 kilometres west of Kandahar city, Afghanistan, during a lengthy firefight with Taliban insurgents. She was the first-ever female Canadian soldier killed in combat.
In 2006, the House of Commons voted 149-145 on a motion to extend the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan by two years to February 2009.
In 2007, a Hutterrite community in Alberta that believes willfully being photographed is a sin, won the legal right to have a provincial driver's licence without a picture.
In 2007, the Bank of Montreal revealed it would incur a $680-million trading loss, the biggest in Canadian history, after potential irregularities at its natural-gas trading division in the United States.
In 2008, Canadian Autumn Kelly married the Queen's eldest grandson, Peter Phillips, in a ceremony in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.
In 2009, Dalia Grybauskaite, 53, the European Union's budget chief, became Lithuania's first female president following a landslide election victory.
In 2011, Queen Elizabeth II arrived in Ireland for a historic four-day journey of reconciliation. It was the first trip by a British monarch to Ireland since 1911, a decade before it won independence from Britain following a cutthroat guerrilla war.
In 2012, Jenna Talackova made history as the first-ever transgender contestant to compete at the Miss Universe Canada pageant. She was initially barred from competing because she was born male. She made the top-12 before being eliminated. (Sahar Biniaz claimed the crown.)
In 2013, Elijah Harper, the Cree politician who clutched an eagle feather as he blocked the Meech Lake constitutional accord in 1990 and led Canadian indigenous people into a new era, died of cardiac failure due to diabetes complications. He was 64.
In 2019, Canada announced an end to a year-long standoff with the Trump administration over punitive steel and aluminum tariffs. U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports, and retaliatory Canadian tariffs on $16 billion worth of American products, were to be removed within 48 hours. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the full lifting of the tariffs removed a key hurdle in efforts to ratify the new North American trade pact. The U.S. had been pushing for quotas on Canadian steel and aluminum shipments but Trudeau said Canada stayed strong in fighting tariffs that did not make sense on American national security grounds.
In 2019, Herman Wouk, the versatile, Pulitzer Prize winning author of such million-selling novels as "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Winds of War" whose steady Jewish faith inspired his stories of religious values and secular success, died at 103.
In 2020, Capt. Jenn Casey, an Armed Forces public affairs officer with the famed Canadian Armed Forces Snowbirds team, was killed in a crash in Kamloops, B.C. Video of the incident showed the aircraft climbing into the sky before rolling, nosediving and plunging to the ground. It happened as the Snowbirds were scheduled to make a trip from Kamloops to Kelowna as part of Operation Inspiration, the cross-country tour aimed at boosting the morale of Canadians struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Capt. Richard MacDougall, the pilot of the aircraft, was injured in the crash.
In 2020, award-winning Quebec actress Monique Mercure died at 89 after a battle with throat cancer. Appearing in such films as "Naked Lunch,'' "The Red Violin'' and "Conquest,'' Mercure won best actress awards at both the Cannes Film Festival and Canadian Film Awards in 1977 for her performance in "J.A. Martin Photographer.''
In 2021, the low-cost coach company Megabus expanded its service in Ontario after Greyhound left the Canadian market the previous week. It planned to run buses four days a week between Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa with two trips in each direction per day.
In 2021, another military officer took over as vaccine rollout boss. Brig.-Gen. Krista Brodie replaced Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin. He was relieved of the job in light of a military investigation alleging sexual misconduct, which reports claim dated back to 1989.
In 2024, Public Health Ontario reported a child under five years old died after being hospitalized for measles. The child hadn't been vaccinated against the disease. Officials said it was the first such death in 11 years.
In 2024, the Israeli military said its troops found the bodies of three Israeli hostages killed by Hamas at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and taken into Gaza. The hostages were 22-year-old Shani Louk, 28-year-old Amit Buskila and 56-year-old Itzhak Gelerenter. Photos and video of Louk's twisted body in the back of a pickup truck played around the world on Oct. 7 2023, highlighting the scale and horror of the militants' attack.
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The Canadian Press
