01010617 This Day In History, June 17

1462: Vlad III the Impaler attempted to assassinate Mehmed II, forcing him to retreat from Wallachia.

1579: Sir Francis Drake claimed San Francisco Bay for England. He called it Nova Albion. Albion, meaning "the white" ("albino" originated from the same root word) was an ancient name for the island of Britain, from the White Cliffs of Dover). The Spanish however were later to take possession of it and most of what is today the southwestern states of the U.S.

1631: Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, spent the next 20 years building her mausoleum - the now world-famous Taj Mahal.

1673: French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reached the Mississippi River.

1799: Napoleon Bonaparte incorporated Italy into the French empire.

1867: Joseph Lister performed the first surgical operation under antiseptic conditions on his sister Isabella, at Glasgow's Royal Infirmary in Scotland.

1876 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne led by Crazy Horse (the leader of the Sioux at the battle of the Little Bighorn a few days later, in which Custer and his 7th cavalry were wiped out) repelled General George Crook's attack at Rosebud Creek in Montana.

1885: The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City from Europe. While most are aware that it was a gift from the Roman-Catholic people and government of France, very few are realize that the Statue of Liberty was a deliberate, as stated by its builders, reproduction of the ancient Roman goddess Libertas, idol-worshipping Rome's "goddess of freedom." A 2,000 year-old Roman coin from 42 BC, from the era of the birth of the Roman Empire, as shown in the photograph, shows Libertas (including the idol's name, the Latin Libertas, in English meaning "Lady Liberty" right on the coin); the face and the crown are identical to the Statue of Liberty.

1924: The Fascist militia marched into Rome.

1925: 29 countries signed the Geneva Protocol which prohibited the use of poison gas in war.

1939: The last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, was beheaded in Versailles at the Saint-Pierre prison.

1967: China detonated its first hydrogen bomb.

1972: Five White House operatives were arrested at the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington. The break-in eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

1974: An Irish republican guerrilla bomb exploded at Westminster Hall, in the British Houses of Parliament injuring 11.

1994: After the "L.A. Freeway Bronco Chase," O.J. Simpson was arrested for the knife murders of his former wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was later acquitted of the murders by a jury of his "peers."

1997: During the Amsterdam conference of European Union members, a French diplomat replied in response to the slow progress of negotiations, "Rome wasn't built in a day" (see What Is The Mark Of The Beast? and What And Where Is Babylon Today?).