On July 25 ...

In 1866 Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to the rank of general of the Army.

In 1868 Congress passed an act creating the Wyoming Territory.

In 1878 the first Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States arrived in Washington.

In 1907 Japan imposed a protectorate on Korea, giving Japan control over its government.

In 1909 French aviator Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel in a monoplane, traveling from Calais to Dover in 37 minutes.

In 1917 the Dutch spy known as Mata Hari was sentenced to death by a French court for spying for Germany during World War I.

In 1934 Nazi Black Guard troops assassinated Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.

In 1943 Benito Mussolini was deposed as Italy’s premier by King Victor Emmanuel III and placed under arrest. (He later was rescued by the Nazis and briefly regained power.)

In 1946 the United States detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of such a device.

In 1952 Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1956 the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm in heavy fog off the coast of New England, killing 51 people.

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 1963 the United States, Soviet Union and Britain signed a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, space or underwater.

In 1969 Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the fatal accident in which campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. (Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence.)

In 1971 Dr. Christiaan Barnard transplanted two lungs and a heart into a man in Cape Town, South Africa.

In 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton disclosed he had once undergone psychiatric treatment for depression.

In 1974 the Supreme Court raised major hurdles to merging city and suburban schools for racial integration by all but banning the busing of children across school district lines for purposes of desegregation.

In 1976, on the surface of Mars, Viking I’s robotic arm, which had balked in an earlier test, was found ready to begin picking up soil samples.

In 1984 Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.

In 1992 opening ceremonies were held in Barcelona, Spain, for the Summer Olympics.

In 1993 Israeli launched a week of raids on guerrilla bases in south Lebanon while guerrillas fired rockets into Israel. (The fighting ended July 31 with a U.S.-brokered cease-fire.)

In 1995 a bomb exploded on a Paris subway, killing seven people and injuring at least 60.

In 1998 two government officials disclosed that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr had subpoenaed President Bill Clinton to testify before a federal grand jury about the Monica Lewinsky case.

In 2000 an Air France Concorde supersonic jetliner en route to New York crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people aboard and four people on the ground; it was the first crash of a Concorde.

In 2001 Phoolan Devi, known in India as the “Bandit Queen” who became a legislator, was shot and killed outside her New Delhi home.

In 2002 Zacarias Moussaoui declared he was guilty of conspiracy in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then withdrew his plea at his arraignment in Alexandria, Va. Also in 2002 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill allowing Russians to sell and lease farmland for the first time since 1917.