Today in History....July 25

On this day in …


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

* 1868, Congress passed an act creating the Wyoming Territory

* 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest. (However, Mussolini was later rescued by the Nazis, ym"sh, and reasserted his authority.)

* 1946, the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device

* 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the U.S.

* 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; at least 51 people were killed. (The Andrea Doria sank the following day, eleven hours after the crash.)

* 1963, the U.S., Soviet Union and Britain initialed a treaty in Moscow prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in space or underwater

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

* 1997, K.R. Narayanan was sworn in as India's president, becoming the first member of the "untouchable" Dalits caste to do so

* 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

* 2002, encouraged by a tapping sound coming up from the depths, rescuers in Somerset, Pa., brought in a huge drill in a race to save nine coal miners trapped 240 feet underground by a flooded shaft.
ALSO: Zacarias Moussaoui declared he was guilty of conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks, then dramatically withdrew his plea at his arraignment in Alexandria, Va.

* 2005, Israeli troops sealed off a Hezbollah stronghold and widened their control of southern Lebanon. ALSO: President Bush was visited at the White House by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said he and Bush agreed that training and better arming Iraqi forces as quickly as possible was central to efforts to stabilizing his country