April 17

1492 – Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand and Christopher Columbus sign the negotiated Capitulations of Santa Fe for his voyage to Asia to acquire spices, granting him the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy, Governor General, the honorific Don, and also the tenth part of all riches to be obtained from his intended voyage.

1521 – The trial of Martin Luther over his religious teachings begins during the assembly of the Diet of Worms.

1524 – In the service of King Francis I of France, Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano is the first European to reach New York harbor during his voyage of exploration of the Atlantic coast of North America between what is now Florida and New Brunswick.

1861 – The state of Virginia’s secession convention votes to secede from the United States, later becoming the eighth state to join the Confederate States of America.

1905 – In the case of Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court decides that the “right to free contract” is implicit in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

1907 – The Ellis Island immigration center sets a record processing 11,747 people in one day.

1961 – A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.

1969 – Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy and sentenced to death with the sentenced later commuted to life imprisonment.

1970 – The Apollo 13 astronauts return to Earth safely when their Command Module Odyssey splashed down in the Pacific ocean, southeast of American Samoa.

1978 – The leader of the Parcham faction of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Mir Akbar Khyber, is assassinated in Kabul.

2013 – While emergency services personnel were responding to a fire set by an arsonist at the West Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, ammonium nitrate in the structure explodes, killing 15 people and injuring 160 others.

2014 – NASA’s Kepler space telescope confirms the discovery of the first Earth-size planet, Kepler-186F orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Kepler-186 in the constellation of Cygnus.