History of the Day for:
February 17
- 1801: The House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president. Burr became vice president.
- 1817: The first gas-lit streetlights appeared on the streets of Baltimore.
- 1864: The Confederate hand-propelled submarine Hunley, armed with a ram torpedo, sunk the Union's Houstanic in Charleston, S.C. It was considered the first successful attack by a submarine.
- 1865: Columbia, S.C., burned as the Confederates evacuated and Union forces moved in.
- 1867: The first ship passed through the Suez Canal.
- 1870: Mississippi became the ninth state readmitted to the U.S. after the Civil War.
- 1876: In Eastport, Maine, Julius Wolff was credited with being the first to can sardines.
- 1880: Tsar Alexander II of Russia survived an assassination attempt when a bomb exploded in the imperial dining room at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
- 1897: The forerunner of the National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, was founded in Washington.
- 1904: The opera "Madam Butterfly" by Giacomo Puccini was first performed, at La Scala, Milan, Italy.
- 1909: Geronimo, the last Apache chief to surrender to the American government, died in Fort Sill.
- 1913: In Oregon, the first minimum wage law in the U.S. took effect.
- 1933: "Newsweek" was first published; Blondie Boopadoop married Dagwood Bumstead three years after "Blondie" debuted in newspapers.
- 1934: The first high school automobile driver's education course was introduced in State College, Pa.
- 1936: "The Phantom" cartoon strip debuted.
- 1944: World War II: Battle of Eniwetok Atoll begins. The battle ends in an American victory on February 22.
- 1944: World War II: Operation Hailstone begins. U.S. naval air, surface, and submarine attack against Truk (Chuuk), Japan's main base in the central Pacific, in support of the Eniwetok invasion.
- 1947: The Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
- 1964: The Supreme Court issued its "Westberry v. Sanders" decision, ruling congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population.
- 1972: President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.
- 1979: The Sino-Vietnamese War begins.
- 1988: Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, an American officer serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group, was kidnapped in southern Lebanon.
- 1992: A court in Milwaukee, Wisconsin sentences serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer to life in prison.
- 1995: Colin Ferguson is convicted of six counts of murder for the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings and later receives a 200+ year sentence.
- 1995: The Cenepa War between Peru and Ecuador ends on a cease-fire brokered by the UN.
- 1996: In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, world champion Garry Kasparov beats the Deep Blue supercomputer in a chess match.
- 1996: NASA's Discovery Program begins as the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft lifts off on the first mission ever to orbit and land upon an asteroid, 433 Eros.
- 2003: The London Congestion Charge scheme begins.
- 2006: A massive mudslide occurs in Southern Leyte, Philippines; the official death toll is set at 1,126.
- 2008: Kosovo declares independence.