By Day: Historical Events on April 17th

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is destroyed by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.

William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, becomes the Duke at the age of 8 after the death of his father, Robert I.

Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.

Christopher Columbus receives funding for his expedition from Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain.

English poet William Wordsworth first publishes "Poems in Two Volumes."

American engineer and inventor William R. Johnson patents the bicycle.

The Treaty of Paris ends the Spanish-American War, ceding Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States.

The Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) Invasion on the southwestern coast of Cuba begins. The CIA trained forces consisting of about 1,500 Cuban exiles assembled and launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua by boat with the objective to ignite an uprising that would overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. The Cuban military crushed the incursion by the third day. The invasion was a U.S. foreign policy failure. The Cuban government's victory solidified Castro's role as a national hero and pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. More

The Khmer Rouge troops capture Phnom Penh and the government forces surrender five days after the last helicopter taking American citizens and X Cambodia XYZ left the country. 
The Khmer Rouge  led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 during which The regime tried to purify the nation of suspected corruption and counter-revolutionary tendencies in order to bring about its utopian communist vision for Cambodia. But their extreme ideology and tactics  targeted most segments of Cambodian society for destruction. It is estimated that the regime was responsible for the deaths of two million of the country’s seven million people. More