POPnews (US) - July 25th

[Operation Crossroads was actually a pair of nuclear explosions, the first of which had been detonated on July 1st... While both explosions carried a yield of 23 kilotons the blast on this day, codenamed Baker, differed from its predecessor, Able, mainly because it was set off 27m (90 ft) underwater, rather than at an altitude of 158m (520 ft). A third operation, called Charlie, was cancelled.]
1814 - During the War of 1812, at the Battle of Lundy's Lane, reinforcements for General Phineas Riall's British and Canadian forces arrived near Niagara Falls and a bloody, all-night battle with Jacob Brown's Americans began shortly after 6 pm, following which the Americans retreated to Fort Erie.

1853 - Joaquin Murietta - the famous Californio bandit known as 'Robin Hood of El Dorado' - was killed.

1861 - Near the outset of the American Civil War the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution was passed by Congress stating that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.

1866 - The US Congress passed legislation authorizing the rank of General of the Army (commonly called '5-star general'); Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant became the first recipient of this rank.

1868 - Wyoming became a United States territory.

1897 - Writer Jack London sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he wrote his first successful stories; while in the far north, though, his health rapidly deteriorated, leaving him toothless from scurvy and his face permanently scarred.

1898 - The US invasion of Puerto Rico began when troops landed at the harbor of Guánica, led by General Nelson A. Miles; while the land invasion, proper, began that day, sea-based bombardment and shelling of the capital city of San Juan had been occurring since May 1898.

1946 - As part of Operation Crossroads the US military detonated an atomic bomb underwater in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll; owing to radioactive contamination, the site remains uninhabitable to this day.

1956 - 45 miles south of Nantucket Island, the Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the MS Stockholm in heavy fog and sank the next day, killing 51.

1969 - President Richard Nixon declared the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expected its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense; this began the so-called 'Vietnamization' of the Vietnam War.

1978 - The Cerro Maravilla Incident occurred when Puerto Rican independence activists Carlos Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado were killed in a police ambush; their driver was undercover agent Alejandro Gonzalez Malavé, who was himself killed eight years later by Los Macheteros.
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