Today is Saturday, July 25, the 207th day of 2020. There are 159 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 25, 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.
On this date:
In 1814, the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812, took place in present-day Niagara Falls, Ontario, with no clear victor.
In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.
In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)
In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.
In 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.
In 1985, a spokeswoman for Rock Hudson confirmed that the actor, hospitalized in Paris, was suffering from AIDS. (Hudson died in October 1985.)
In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.
Today’s Birthdays: Folk-pop singer-musician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 78. Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 77. Rock musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 69. Singer-musician Jem Finer (The Pogues) is 65. Model-actress Iman is 65. Cartoonist Ray Billingsley (“Curtis”) is 63. Rock musician Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) is 62. Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 61. Actress-singer Bobbie Eakes is 59. Actress Katherine Kelly Lang is 59. Actress Illeana Douglas is 55. Country singer Marty Brown is 55. Actor Matt LeBlanc is 53.
