Today in history

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 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest. (However, Mussolini was later rescued by the Nazis, and re-asserted his authority.)

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.)