Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/August 17

This is a list of selected August 17 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← August 16	August 18 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Hurricane Camille
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  Robert Fulton
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  Soldiers lay flowers at the memorial for the Hill 303 massacre
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  Damage from the 1999 earthquake at İzmit, Turkey
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  Miles Davis
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  Soviet icebreaker NS Arktika
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  Michael Phelps
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  Battle of Verneuil
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  Pike Place Market

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Independence Day in Gabon (1960)	refimprove section
1807 – Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat, the world's first commercially successful paddle steamer, went into service on the Hudson River in New York.	page numbers needed
1862 – A council of Dakota decided to attack settlements throughout the Minnesota River valley in an effort to drive whites out of the area, sparking the Dakota War.	refimprove section
1866 - The Grand Duchy of Baden announced its withdrawal from the German Confederation and signed a treaty of peace and alliance with Prussia.	single source
1947 – A commission led by Cyril Radcliffe established the Radcliffe Line, the border between India and Pakistan after the Partition of India.	cleanup required
1959 – A magnitude 7.3 ML earthquake occurred in southwestern Montana, U.S., causing a huge landslide that caused over 28 fatalities and created Quake Lake.	page numbers needed
1962 – East German border guards shot and killed Peter Fechter as he attempted to cross the Berlin Wall into West Berlin.	refimprove
1980 – Two-month-old Australian Azaria Chamberlain was taken from her family's campsite at Uluru by a dingo, for which her mother was wrongly convicted of murder.	lots of CN tags in one section
1991 – A spree killer went on a shooting rampage at a shopping mall in Strathfield, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, killing seven people before being committing suicide.	lots of CN tags in one section
1998 – U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted in taped testimony that he had an "improper physical relationship" with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.	appears on January 26
Nitta Yoshisada |d|1338	date not cited
Davy Crockett |b|1786	in popular culture

Eligible

• 1424 – Hundred Years' War: Allied English and Burgundian forces gained a strategically important victory at the bloody Battle of Verneuil in Normandy, France.
• 1676 – Scanian War: Swedish forces defeated Danish troops at the Battle of Halmstad, the last battle in Halland between the two countries.
• 1884 – The German colony of Kamerun was established, in the region of today's Republic of Cameroon and surrounding areas.
• 1907 – Pike Place Market (pictured), one of the oldest continuously operated public farmers' markets in the U.S. and a popular tourist attraction, opened in Seattle, Washington.
• 1914 – World War I: Ignoring orders to retreat, Hermann von François led a successful counterattack defending East Prussia at the Battle of Stallupönen and scored the first German victory in the Eastern Front.
• 1915 – American Jew Leo Frank was lynched by a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, for the alleged murder of a 13-year-old girl.
• 1915 – The Category 4 1915 Galveston hurricane made landfall in Galveston, Texas, and caused a great deal of destruction in its path, leaving 275-400 people dead and $50 million in damage.
• 1916 – World War I: Romania signed a secret treaty with the Entente Powers, agreeing to enter the war in return for promised territory in Austria-Hungary.
• 1943 – Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in a highly secret military conference held in Quebec City.
• 1943 – Second World War: The Royal Air Force began a strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany's V-weapon programme by attacking the Peenemünde Army Research Center.
• 1945 – Animal Farm, George Orwell's satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, was first published.
• 1950 – Korean War: Forty-two American prisoners of war were massacred by the Korean People's Army on a hill above Waegwan, South Korea.
• 1969 – Hurricane Camille struck the Mississippi coast of the United States, killing 259 people and causing $1.42 billion in damage..
• 1977 – The Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika became the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.
• 1999 – An earthquake registering 7.6 M_w northwestern Turkey, killing more than 17,000 people and leaving more than 250,000 homeless.
• 2009 – A hydroelectric turbine at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam in Russia catastrophically failed, flooding the turbine hall, killing 75 people and causing widespread power outages.
• Born/died: | Li Shouzhen |d|949| Katharina von Zimmern |d|1547|Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen |d|1676| Matthew Boulton |d|1809| Gene Stratton-Porter |b|1863| Margaret Hamilton |b|1936| Billy Fiske |d|1940| Robert De Niro |b|1943| Korrie Layun Rampan |b|1953| Sean Penn |b|1960| Dawn Mabalon |b|1972| Thierry Henry |b|1977| Tarja Turunen |b|1977| Paige |b|1992

Notes

• Bloody Gulch massacre appears on August 12, so Hill 303 should not appear in the same year
• Hurricane Charley appears on August 13 and Hurricane Andrew is on August 24, so Hurricane Camille should not appear in the same year
• Atlantic Charter appears on August 14, so Quebec Conference should not appear in the same year
• Eustathios Daphnomeles appears on August 15, so Battle of the Gates of Trajan should not appear in the same year

August 17: Independence Day in Indonesia (1945)

Sukarno proclaiming Indonesia's independence, with Hatta on the right

• 986 – Byzantine–Bulgarian wars: The Bulgarians defeated Byzantine forces at the Battle of the Gates of Trajan near present-day Ihtiman, with Emperor Basil II barely escaping.
• 1560 – The Scottish Reformation Parliament approved a Protestant confession of faith, initiating the Scottish Reformation and disestablishing Catholicism as the national religion.
• 1945 – The independence of Indonesia was proclaimed by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta (pictured), igniting the Indonesian National Revolution against the Dutch Empire.
• 1959 – American musician Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, which became one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed jazz recordings of all time.
• 2008 – Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal of the Beijing Summer Olympics, the most golds by any person at a single games.

• Matthew Boulton (d. 1809)
• Leslie Groves (b. 1896)
• Maureen O'Hara (b. 1920)

More anniversaries:

• August 16
• August 17
• August 18