July 17

Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne were executed in Paris during the Reign of Terror, singing as they went to the guillotine.

Walter Evans-Wentz, the anthropologist who edited and published an early English edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, died in Encinitas, California.

On 17 July 1975, an American Apollo craft and a Soviet Soyuz linked up in orbit and their crews shook hands, the first docking between spacecraft of two different nations.