YEARS AGO FOR DECEMBER 17

Today is Sunday, Dec. 17, the 351st day of 2017. There are 14 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1777: France recognizes American independence.

1862: Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issues Order No. 11, expelling Jews from Tennessee.

1865: Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, known as the “Unfinished” because only two movements have been completed, is first performed publicly in Vienna 37 years after the composer’s death

1895: The Anti-Saloon League of America forms in Washington, D.C.

1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, conduct the first successful manned powered-airplane flights near Kitty Hawk, N.C., using their experimental craft, the Wright Flyer

1939: The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee is scuttled by its crew, ending the World War II Battle of the River Plate off Uruguay.

1944: The War Department announces it is ending its policy of excluding people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.

1957: The United States successfully test-fires the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.

1979: Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance executive, is fatally injured after leading police on a chase with his motorcycle in Miami. (Four white police officers accused of beating McDuffie were later acquitted, sparking riots.)

1981: Members of the Red Brigades kidnap Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier, the highest-ranking U.S. Army official in southern Europe, from his home in Verona, Italy. (Dozier was rescued 42 days later.)

1992: U.S. President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sign the North American Free Trade Agreement in separate ceremonies.

2011: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il dies after more than a decade of iron rule; he was 69, according to official records, but some reports indicate he was 70.

2007: Gov. Jon Corzine signs a bill making New Jersey the first state to abolish the death penalty in more than 40 years.

2012: Newtown, Conn., begins laying its dead to rest, holding funerals for two 6-year-old boys, the first of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

2016: President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Mick Mulvaney, a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina, to be the White House budget director.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, the surgeon who created the life-saving Heimlich maneuver for choking victims, dies in Cincinnati at 96.

VINDICATOR FILES

1992: Commercial Intertech Corp. says that record deliveries in the Astron Building Division and improved sales in the hydraulic components group contributed to record 1992 sales of $450.6 million.

Youngstown State University President Leslie Cochran is confident that the university can raise $1.4 million in private money to help build a new School of Education building.

Mahoning County commissioners grant $39,000 in raises to their employees. Commissioners-elect Frank Lordi and David Engler criticize the action by commissioners John Palermo and Leonard Yurcho, who will be leaving office at the end of the year.

1977: Six Youngstown State University cadets in the Reserve Officer Training Corps program are administered the oath of office of second lieutenants in the Army: David C. Wilhide, Roy Wilt, Richard C. Gappen, Carol M. McMichael, Michael S. Pazsint and Paul Lacusky.

Two men being chased by security guards and Boardman police from the Southern Park Mall lose control of the car in Glenwood Avenue and strike a tree. The 43-year-old passenger is killed, and the 35-year-old driver is injured.

Mrs. Mary Muffley, 36, receptionist for Dr. Leo F. DiBlasio, dies in St. Elizabeth Hospital two days after being shot during an ambush outside the doctor’s Girard office. Mrs. Patricia DiBlasio, 40, was also killed, and Dr. DiBlasio, 50, wounded.

1967: A Greenville, Pa., farmer, Dale Kyser, 58, suffocates when the earth caves in while he was helping lay a sewer line for a parsonage at the Nazarene Church on East Grant Street.

The impending merger of Wean Industries of Warren and United Engineering & Foundry of Pittsburgh helps halt erosion of the Youngstown district’s financial power.

Advertisement: New “N” gauge “postage stamp” trains are available at Amer’s Hobby Shop, 6010 Market St. Also, “HO” trains, race sets, paint-by-number, microscopes and chemistry sets.

1942: Mrs. John Realty, 37, is struck and killed while crossing Oak Street near Euclid Avenue with her husband. It is the 34th traffic fatality in Youngstown in 1942, compared to 31 a year ago.

Frank Mouery, chairman of the Retail Merchants Board, announces that most downtown stores will be closed Dec. 26.

In the first coasting accident of the season, Martha Kline, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kline of Struthers, suffers a possible concussion and severe facial cuts.