Reuters historical calendar - July 17

London, July 16 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on July 17 in history: 1903 - The American-born artist James Whistler, best known for the portrait of his mother, died.

1917 - Britain's royal family changed its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor amid anti-German feelings during World War One.

1945 - The post-World War Two Potsdam Conference began, bringing together British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and US President Harry Truman.

1951 - Belgium's Prince Baudouin became king after his father Leopold III abdicated.

1959 - Billie Holiday, jazz and blues singer, died.

1968 - A Revolutionary Command Council headed by General Hassan al-Bakr took power in Iraq.

1969 - In Spain, Generalisimo Francisco Franco named Prince Juan Carlos as his eventual successor as head of state.

1973 - A military coup in Afghanistan led by former prime minister Sardar Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew King Mohammed Zahir Shah; a republic was proclaimed with Daoud as president.

1975 - Apollo 18 and the Soviet Union's Soyuz 19 linked up 210 km above the Earth. Commanders Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands through the hatches of their spacecraft and exchanged greetings in each other's languages.

1979 - Anastasio Somoza resigned as Nicaraguan president and fled the country; a government headed by the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega took over.

1981 - More than 100 people died when Israeli jets bombed Palestinian areas of Beirut.

1984 - Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space during the flight of Soyuz T-12. The walk lasted three and a half hours.

1992 - Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel announced his resignation; the Slovaks, who had rejected Havel as head of state, proclaimed their sovereignty.

1995 - Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina, five times world motor racing champion, died.

1996 - TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean after taking off from New York en route for Paris. All 230 people on board died.

1998 - Three tidal waves caused by an undersea earthquake swept away villages in northwest Papua New Guinea, killing some 2,000 people.

2000 - Bashar al-Assad was formally sworn in as president of Syria, taking up the office his late father, Hafez al-Assad, had held for the previous three decades.

2003 - Rosalyn Tureck, American pianist, harpsichordist and clavichordist and passionate interpreter of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, died. She was 88.

2005 - Former British prime minister Edward Heath, who took Britain into the forerunner of the European Union during his term in office in the early 1970s, died aged 89.

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