July 17 in History

A teenage peasant girl from Lorraine escorted a reluctant prince through English-held territory to the cathedral where French kings had been crowned for eight centuries, and the coronation she engineered on July 17, 1429, transformed the Hundred Years' War. Charles VII was anointed at Reims Cathedral with Joan of Arc standing nearby in full armor, holding her banner. The ceremony gave Charles the legitimacy he had lacked for seven years and rallied French resistance to English occupation. Charles's claim to the throne had been contested since the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, when his father, the mentally ill Charles VI, disinherited him in favor of England's Henry V. When both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422, the English crowned the infant Henry VI as king of both England and France. Charles retreated south of the Loire, controlling roughly a third of his kingdom, while the Anglo-Burgundian alliance held Paris and most of northern France. French morale was shattered, and the siege of Orléans in 1428 threatened to extinguish the Valois cause entirely. Joan arrived at Charles's court in Chinon in March 1429, claiming divine voices had commanded her to lift the siege and see the Dauphin crowned. Despite skepticism, Charles allowed her to join the relief force. Joan's presence electrified the French army. The siege of Orléans was broken in nine days, and Joan led a lightning campaign up the Loire valley, winning engagements at Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency, and Patay in rapid succession. The road to Reims lay open, and Charles followed Joan's urging to march north immediately rather than consolidate his gains. The coronation at Reims carried enormous symbolic and legal weight. The cathedral had hosted every French coronation since 816, and the sacred oil used in the anointing ritual was believed to have been delivered by a dove from heaven for the baptism of Clovis. Once anointed, Charles was the legitimate king in the eyes of French law and the Catholic Church, regardless of English claims. Joan's mission was fulfilled, though her own fate was already darkening. Captured by Burgundian forces in May 1430, she was sold to the English and burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431. Charles made no effort to ransom her.

Three leaders who barely trusted each other sat down in a German palace to divide a continent, and the decisions they made over seventeen days shaped the Cold War before it had a name. The Potsdam Conference opened on July 17, 1945, at Cecilienhof Palace outside Berlin, with Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin negotiating the postwar settlement for Europe while the rubble of Hitler's capital smoldered a few miles away. Truman had been president for barely three months, and he arrived carrying a secret that changed his negotiating calculus: the Trinity nuclear test had succeeded the morning the conference opened. The agenda was enormous. Germany had surrendered unconditionally on May 8, and the victors had to determine occupation zones, reparations, denazification procedures, territorial adjustments, and the political future of liberated Eastern Europe. The "Big Three" had agreed on broad outlines at Yalta in February 1945, but implementation revealed deep conflicts. Stalin wanted maximum reparations to rebuild the devastated Soviet Union. Truman and Churchill wanted a reconstructed Germany that could stabilize Western Europe. Poland's borders needed redrawing, and millions of ethnic Germans would need to be expelled from territories transferred to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Churchill left the conference midway through and did not return. The British general election of July 26 produced a Labour landslide, and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill at the negotiating table. Truman casually mentioned to Stalin on July 24 that the United States possessed "a new weapon of unusual destructive force." Stalin, whose spies had kept him informed about the Manhattan Project for years, replied that he hoped America would make good use of it. Both men understood the subtext. The Potsdam Agreement divided Germany into four occupation zones, established the framework for war crimes trials at Nuremberg, and authorized the "orderly transfer" of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The conference also issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding Japan's unconditional surrender, warning of "prompt and utter destruction" without specifying the atomic bomb. Japan rejected the ultimatum. Hiroshima was bombed eleven days later. The optimistic language of Allied cooperation at Potsdam masked the emerging reality: the United States and Soviet Union were already competing for influence across the globe, and the wartime alliance would not survive the peace.

Tom Stafford reached through an open hatch 140 miles above the Atlantic Ocean and shook hands with Alexei Leonov on July 17, 1975, creating the first physical link between American and Soviet spacecraft in orbit. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking was a feat of engineering diplomacy, requiring two nations that pointed nuclear weapons at each other to share classified technical specifications, train in each other's languages, and entrust their crews to foreign-built hardware. The technical challenge was substantial. American and Soviet spacecraft had been designed independently with no thought of compatibility. Apollo used a pure oxygen atmosphere at 5 psi; Soyuz used a nitrogen-oxygen mix at standard atmospheric pressure. Opening a hatch between the two without a transition would have risked oxygen toxicity for the cosmonauts or decompression for the astronauts. Engineers designed a docking module that served as both airlock and connection point, with hatches on both ends and its own independent atmosphere control. The module was launched attached to the Apollo spacecraft. Soyuz 19 lifted off from Baikonur at 12:20 UTC on July 15, followed by Apollo from Kennedy Space Center at 19:50 UTC. The two spacecraft rendezvoused on July 17, with Stafford manually guiding Apollo to dock with Soyuz using a new androgynous docking system that allowed either ship to be the active partner. The symbolic equality mattered to the Soviets, who refused any arrangement suggesting their spacecraft was subordinate. Leonov, who had performed the first spacewalk in 1965 and nearly died when his spacesuit ballooned in the vacuum, greeted Stafford with a bear hug. The crews exchanged flags, shared meals of borscht and turkey, and conducted five joint scientific experiments over two days. Deke Slayton, flying for the first and only time after being grounded for thirteen years, floated between the two vessels with evident joy. The mission proved that international cooperation in space was technically feasible and politically survivable, establishing a precedent that led to the Shuttle-Mir program and ultimately the International Space Station, the most complex and longest-running international engineering project in human history.

Walt Disney sank his personal fortune, mortgaged his life insurance, and borrowed against future television revenue to build a theme park that every amusement industry expert told him would fail. Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955, and the invitation-only premiere was a legendary disaster that nearly destroyed the park's reputation before it began. Within a year, one million visitors had come, and Disney had created an entirely new form of American entertainment. Disney conceived the park after taking his daughters to local amusement parks and finding them dirty, poorly maintained, and unwelcoming to families. He envisioned a clean, meticulously themed environment where adults and children could share experiences. The entertainment industry dismissed the idea. Disney's own brother Roy initially refused to fund it. Studio executives called it "Walt's folly." Disney financed construction by partnering with ABC television, which invested $500,000 and guaranteed $4.5 million in loans in exchange for a weekly television show that doubled as promotion for the park. The 160-acre orange grove in Anaheim was transformed in just over a year of frantic construction. Opening day, broadcast live on ABC as "Dateline: Disneyland," was a catastrophe of logistics. Counterfeit invitations doubled the expected crowd to 28,000. The asphalt on Main Street was freshly poured and women's heels sank into it. A plumbers' strike forced Disney to choose between functioning drinking fountains and working toilets; he chose toilets, and the press complained about a lack of water on a 101-degree day. Rides broke down. Food ran out. Frank Sinatra was trapped on the Mark Twain riverboat with hundreds of other guests. The press coverage was savage. Disney and his team spent the following weeks fixing every problem, and public reaction quickly diverged from the critics. Families loved the experience. Disneyland drew its millionth guest by September and earned $10 million in its first year. Disney's innovations, including themed "lands," controlled sightlines that eliminated views of the outside world, and continuously maintained attractions, became the global standard for theme park design. The concept spawned Walt Disney World in Florida, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong, collectively attracting over 150 million visitors annually.

Bolshevik executioners woke the Romanov family at 1:30 a.m. on July 17, 1918, led them to a basement room in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, and opened fire with revolvers at point-blank range. Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, the family physician, and three servants were killed in a chaotic slaughter that took twenty minutes because the bullets ricocheted off jewels sewn into the women's corsets. The execution ended three centuries of Romanov rule and became one of the twentieth century's most extensively investigated murders. Nicholas had abdicated in March 1917 after the February Revolution, expecting to take his family into exile in Britain. His cousin King George V initially agreed to offer asylum but quietly withdrew the invitation, fearing that hosting the unpopular tsar would provoke republican sentiment at home. The Provisional Government held the family at the Alexander Palace near Petrograd, then moved them to Tobolsk in Siberia. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the family was transferred to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where they were held under increasingly harsh conditions. The decision to execute came from the top. Yakov Yurovsky, the local Cheka commander, received orders from the Ural Soviet, almost certainly with Lenin's approval, as White Army forces approached Yekaterinburg. The family was told they were being moved for their safety and brought to the basement. Yurovsky read a brief statement announcing the execution, and Nicholas barely had time to say "What?" before the shooting began. The children proved hardest to kill. Anastasia and her siblings were initially protected by the diamonds hidden in their clothing, and soldiers resorted to bayonets and additional gunshots. The bodies were loaded onto a truck, doused with sulfuric acid and gasoline, and buried in a shallow pit in the Koptyaki forest. The remains were discovered in 1991, and DNA analysis confirmed the identities. Two missing children, believed to be Alexei and Maria, were found in a separate grave in 2007. The Romanovs were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 as "passion bearers." The Ipatiev House was demolished on Boris Yeltsin's orders in 1977, but a cathedral now stands on the site, drawing thousands of pilgrims annually.