A few of the great historical events that happened today in history, January 17th!

1562	French Protestants were recognized under the Edict of St. Germain.
1601	The Treaty of Lyons ends a short war between France and Savoy.
1706	Statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston.
1746	Charles Edward Stuart, the young pretender, defeats the government forces at the battle of Falkirk in Scotland.
1773	Captain James Cook becomes the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle.
1806	Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.
1819	Simon Bolivar the “liberator” proclaims Columbia a republic.
1852	At the Sand River Convention, the British recognize the independence of the Transvaal Board.
1893	Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, is overthrown by a group of American sugar planters led by Sanford Ballard Dole.
1893	Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, died in Fremont, Ohio, at age 70.
1899	Gangster Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, N.Y.
1939	The Reich issues an order forbidding Jews to practice as dentists, veterinarians and chemists.
1945	Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II.
1945	Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, was taken into Soviet custody in Budapest, Hungary. (His fate has never been determined.)
1946	The United Nations Security Council held its first meeting.
1963	Soviet leader Khrushchev visits the Berlin Wall.
1977	Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade.
1985	A jury in New Jersey rules that terminally ill patients have the right to starve themselves.
1994	A magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage.
1995	A magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the city of Kobe, Japan; more than 6,000 people were killed.
1997	A court in Ireland granted the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country’s history.
1998	President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to testify as a defendant in a criminal or civil suit when he answered questions from lawyers for Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment.
2001	Faced with an electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people.
2008	Chess master Bobby Fischer died at age 64.

Today in history facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, and HistoryOrb.com.