July 17th Through Time: Handshakes in Space & Birthdays That Changed History

On July 17th, 1975, an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut shook hands in space for the very first time. Just yesterday, we talked about the epic leap of Apollo 11 launching on July 16th. Well, six years and one day later, that same Apollo program was being used not for a race, but for a handshake... a moment of impossible diplomacy floating one hundred and forty miles above the Earth. Astronaut Tom Stafford and Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, two men trained to see each other as the enemy, met in a specially built docking module connecting their Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft.

Down on Earth, the Cold War was still very, very cold. But up there... they exchanged flags, shared a meal, and spoke to each other in the other's language. It was a stunning piece of political theater, but it was also genuinely profound. Two rival superpowers, who had spent decades pointing weapons at each other, decided to meet in the one place with no borders. From our vantage point now, it looks like a simple, logical step. Of course they did. But at the time, it was anything but. The technical challenges were immense. The atmospheres inside the two capsules were totally different—the Americans used pure, low-pressure oxygen, the Soviets a normal nitrogen-oxygen mix at sea-level pressure.

A direct connection would have been either explosive or lethal. So they had to build this... this orbital airlock, a hallway in the sky, just so they could meet. It was a triumph of engineering in the service of humanity. A reminder that sometimes the most powerful thing you can build isn't a weapon, but a doorway. Now... let's rewind twenty years from that handshake in space, to July 17th, 1955. To Anaheim, California. Because on this day, another quintessentially American project opened its doors. And it was an absolute, unmitigated, glorious DISASTER. I am talking, of course, about the opening day of Disneyland.

Today, we think of Disneyland as this polished, perfect machine of happiness. But its first day of operation, a press-and-VIP-only event that was supposed to be a triumph, was so catastrophic that employees later dubbed it "Black Sunday." Walt Disney had invited eleven thousand people. But thanks to a roaring trade in counterfeit tickets, nearly thirty thousand showed up. Thirty. Thousand. The temperature hit a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The asphalt on Main Street, which had only been poured the night before, was still soft. So women’s high heels literally sank into the pavement.

A plumbers' strike meant that Walt had to choose between running the bathrooms or the water fountains. He chose the bathrooms. A good call, probably, but it meant on a blistering hot day, there was no drinking water. This, of course, led to rumors—which were totally untrue, but spread like wildfire—that Disney did it on purpose to sell more Pepsi. Oh, it gets better. So much better. A gas leak in Fantasyland forced it, along with Adventureland and Frontierland, to close for the afternoon. Rides broke down constantly. The Mark Twain Riverboat nearly capsized because it was so overloaded with guests.

Food ran out everywhere. Walt was watching the live television broadcast, hosted by his friend Art Linkletter, and just saw chaos. He saw his dream, this meticulously planned kingdom, turning into a hot, sticky, angry mob. He genuinely thought he had failed. He thought Disneyland was a laughingstock that would be shuttered within weeks. And here is the part that, looking back, tells us everything. The reason for the failure... was the sheer, overwhelming, unanticipated demand. People were so desperate to get into this dream world that they forged tickets, scaled fences, and stood for hours in the heat without water.

The dream was SO powerful it nearly destroyed the reality on day one. The failure wasn't a sign of a bad idea. It was proof of an idea so potent, so deeply resonant, that nobody—not even Walt Disney himself—had understood its power. The next day, Monday, July 18th, Disneyland opened to the general public. A line more than a mile long was waiting at the gates before sunrise. They had seen the disaster on television, they had heard the horror stories... and they just wanted in. That is the moment. That’s the turn. It wasn't the flawless execution that made Disneyland an icon. It was the raw, chaotic, human hunger for it, even when it was a complete mess.

Now, let's take a very different turn. Because July 17th also marks one of the most grim and consequential events of the 20th century. While Disneyland was the chaotic birth of a new kind of cultural empire, this day, in 1918, marks the brutal end of an old one. In a fortified house in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the middle of a Russia torn apart by civil war, the last Tsar, Nicholas the Second, his wife Alexandra, and their five children—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir, Alexei—were woken up in the middle of the night. They were told they were being moved for their own safety.

They were led down to a small, bare cellar room. And there, a squad of Bolshevik secret police read out a death sentence and opened fire. For decades, what happened next was shrouded in rumor and myth. The Soviet government admitted to killing the Tsar, but the fate of his family was a state secret. It fueled legends for seventy years—most famously, the story of the Grand Duchess Anastasia somehow surviving. It was a story people wanted to believe. A little bit of impossible light in a very dark room. But we now know the truth. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the secret reports were opened.

In 1991, the unmarked grave was found. DNA testing, using samples from living relatives like Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, confirmed it. They were all there. All except two: Alexei and one of his sisters, Maria. Their absence fueled the mystery for another decade, until their burned remains were found in a separate, nearby grave in 2007. The story wasn't a fairy tale with a lost princess. It was a brutal political execution. The end of a three-hundred-year-old dynasty, snuffed out in a basement. It was a full stop. An act meant to ensure that the past could NEVER come back.

And looking back from where we are now, we can see the terrifying effectiveness of that act. It didn't just end a family; it ended a world. It slammed a door on one version of Russia so that another could be built, and the echoes of that slammed door... we can still hear them today. So what do we make of a day like July 17th? A day that holds a handshake in space, a theme park disaster, and a royal massacre. It feels random, doesn't it? Just a jumble of facts. But history isn't just a list of things that happened. It’s a story about what we value, what we build, and what we destroy.

On this one day, we see it all playing out. We see the end of an old world, in a bloody cellar in Yekaterinburg. We see the chaotic, messy, spectacular birth of a new world, built on fantasy and desire, under the California sun. And we see a glimpse of a different kind of future altogether, a future of cooperation instead of conflict, floating in the silent vacuum of space. These events aren't disconnected. They are all part of the same human story. The story of breaking things and building new ones. The story of old empires falling and new ones rising. Sometimes those new empires are made of steel and ideology, and sometimes...

sometimes they're made of cardboard castles and pure imagination. History isn't a clean narrative. It's the sound of a door slamming in a cellar, the smell of hot asphalt, and a quiet handshake in the silence of space, all happening at once.