Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 17

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 * 1080 – Canute IV became King of Denmark upon the death of his brother Harald III.
 * 1797 – French Revolutionary Wars: British forces commanded by Lieutenant-General Ralph Abercromby invaded the Spanish colonial port of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
 * 1907 – Minas Geraes (pictured), the first of three Brazilian dreadnought battleships, was laid down, sparking a vastly expensive South American naval arms race with Argentina and Chile.
 * 1951 – The Peak District was designated the first national park in the United Kingdom.
 * 1969 – Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
 * 1971 – Ustaše-affiliated Croatian separatists attacked the Yugoslav embassy in Stockholm, fatally shooting the ambassador, Vladimir Rolović.
 * 1975 – The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of the Khmer Republic, ending the Cambodian Civil War and establishing the socialist state of Democratic Kampuchea.
 * 1986 – Having supposedly been at war for 335 years without a single shot having been fired and no casualties incurred, the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly declared peace.
 * 2014 – NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first exoplanet with a radius similar to Earth's discovered in the habitable zone of another star.
 * Born/died: | Bernard of Italy |d|818| Marino Faliero |d|1355| Benjamin Franklin |d|1790| Mary Jefferson Eppes |d|1804| Hannah Webster Foster |d|1840| William R. Day |b|1849| Cap Anson |b|1852|Karen Blixen |b|1885| Neville McNamara |b|1923| Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu |d|1954| Elda Emma Anderson |d|1961| Vikram |b|1966 Victoria Beckham|b|1974

April 17: Evacuation Day in Syria (1946)


 * 1362 – Lithuanian Crusade: After a month-long siege, forces of the Teutonic Order captured and destroyed Kaunas Castle (reconstruction pictured), which was defended by troops of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
 * 1783 – The Mechanical Turk, a fraudulent chess-playing "machine" by Wolfgang von Kempelen that was secretly controlled by a hidden human, began a tour of Europe.
 * 1809 – Napoleonic Wars: After a three-day chase, the French ship D'Hautpoul was captured off Puerto Rico by a British squadron under Alexander Cochrane.
 * 1973 – George Lucas began writing a 13-page film treatment that later formed the basis of Star Wars.
 * 1984 – Metropolitan Police officer Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed while on duty during a protest outside the Libyan embassy in London, resulting in an 11-day police siege of the building and a breakdown of Libya–United Kingdom relations.