Thursday, August 17 --1629 John III Sobieski, king of Poland from 1674 to 1696, born. Polish hero who fought against Swedes, Turks, Tartars and Cossacks.
1743 The peace of Abo was signed, ending the Russo-Swedish War of 1741-43.
1786 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia since 1740, died in Potsdam, and was succeeded by Frederick William II.
1850 Jose de San Martin, soldier, statesman and national hero of Argentina, died.
With Simon Bolivar he led South America's independence movement.
1887 Charles I, last emperor of Austria 1916-18, and king of Hungary 1916-19, born.
1896 George Carmack discovered gold in a tributary of the Klondike River, Canada, precipitating the famous gold rush.
1906 Marcello (Jose) Caetano, Portuguese ruler, born. Prime minister from 1968 until he was ousted in a coup by Antonio Spinola in April 1974.
1929 Francis Gary Powers, U.S. pilot, born.
He was shot down in a spy plane over Soviet territory in 1960, setting off a major diplomatic crisis.
1943 In World War II, U.S. forces under Patton relieved Messina, signaling the end of the Sicilian campaign.
1945 Dr. Sukarno claimed independence for Indonesia from the Netherlands.
1960 Gabon achieved independence from France.
1962 Peter Fechter, 18, was shot by East German guards as he attempted to flee across the Berlin Wall.
Left to bleed to death, his case was the most notorious in the history of the wall.
In July 1996 two former guards were charged with his manslaughter.
1969 Dr. Philip Blaiberg died in South Africa, 19 months and 15 days after receiving a heart transplant, a survival record at the time.
1976 A severe earthquake shook the Philippines Island of Mindanao, leaving about 8,000 people dead.
1978 Three American balloonists, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, completed the first crossing of the North Atlantic in their balloon, Double Eagle II.
1983 Ira Gershwin, U.S. lyricist and elder brother of George, died in Beverly Hills aged 86.
1985 60 people died and 100 were injured in car-bomb explosion in Christian East Beirut.
1987 Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess was found dead in his cell in Spandau Prison, after hanging himself with an electric cord.
1988 Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq and the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel were killed when Zia's plane exploded after takeoff.
1990 Former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere bowed out of mainstream politics when he quit as chairman of the ruling CCM Party.
1990 Iraq, dramatically raising the stakes in the Persian Gulf crisis, said it will keep Western civilians at its military bases and other key installations until the danger of war was over.
1994 Riots spread through Lesotho after King Letsie III dissolved the country's first democratically-elected government for 20 years.
1995 First reports emerged that Alison Hargreaves, the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen, had been killed by an avalanche on K-2 four days earlier.
1996 France's first woman in space, Claudie Andre-Deshays, took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a 16-day scientific mission aboard Russia's orbiting Mir Space Station.
1998 Russia announced an effective devaluation of the rouble and a 90-day moratorium on some foreign debt repayments.
1999 A violent earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale struck the western Turkish city of Izmit, 90 km (55 miles) southeast of Istanbul, killing at least 17,118 people.