Today’s highlight

On July 17, 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States.

On this date

1862: During the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.

1918: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.

1936: The Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic.

1944: During World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.

1945: Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.

1955: Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California.

1975: An Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.

In 1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.

2009: Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite died in New York at 92.