Today in History.....July 25

On this day in …

1832, the first recorded railroad accident in U.S. history occurs when four people are thrown off a vacant car on the Granite Railway near Quincy, Massachusetts. One man was killed and the others were seriously injured.

1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army, the first officer to hold the rank

1868, Congress passed an act creating the Wyoming Territory
1917, Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is sentenced to death in France for spying on Germany's behalf


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, ym"sh, and re-asserted his authority.)

1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device

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

1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain initialed a treaty in Moscow prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in space or underwater

1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first "test tube baby," was born in Oldham, England; she'd been conceived through the technique of in-vitro fertilization


1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries' 46-year-old formal state of war


1996, divers searching the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, N.Y., recovered the flight data and cockpit voice recorder


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