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Made for the 250thOn this day › June 25
What happened on June 25 in American history
June 25 is the 176th day of the year (the 177th in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 19 stories from June 25 spanning 1786 to 2013. Among them: in 1786, Pribylov follows barking seals through fog; the island his charts never showed is real; and in 1788, Virginia ratifies, 89 to 79; the union's largest state is in.
1786Member story · 1776 Club
Pribylov follows barking seals through fog; the island his charts never showed is real
The navigator names the uninhabited land St. George after his ship, leaves twenty men to hunt, and sails north into the same murk.
1788
Virginia ratifies, 89 to 79; the union's largest state is in
Patrick Henry's three weeks of thunder fall short as Edmund Randolph switches sides, and the promise of a Bill of Rights seals the margin.
1876Member story · 1776 Club
Custer leads five companies into a village far larger than warned; not one man with him survives
268 soldiers are dead and 55 severely wounded along the Little Bighorn, the worst blow the U.S. Army has suffered since the Civil War.
1906Member story · 1776 Club
Thaw shoots Stanford White three times on the Madison Square Garden rooftop; White is dead
The Pittsburgh heir crossed the floor during the revue and fired at close range; he tells onlookers White had ruined his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, at sixteen.
1910Member story · 1776 Club
Congress makes it a federal crime to move women across state lines for 'immoral purpose'
The Mann Act targets forced prostitution rings, but 'any other immoral purpose' leaves the law's reach far beyond what its sponsors will say tonight.
1913Member story · 1776 Club
53,000 Blue and Gray veterans converge on Gettysburg, fifty years on
Wilson tells the assembled crowd the old quarrel is forgotten; men from 46 states share meals and a tent city built for 60,000 on the ground where they once fought.
1944Member story · 1776 Club
Deyo's guns silence Cherbourg's batteries; Collins's infantry pushes into the city streets
A combined Anglo-American fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers knocks out 22 of 24 gun targets on the peninsula Hitler ordered held at any cost.
1948Member story · 1776 Club
Truman signs the Displaced Persons Act; 200,000 Europeans may now enter as permanent residents
He signs it with protest: the President objects to clauses that shut out Jewish DPs who did not reach the camps by December 1945.
1950
North Korean guns open on the 38th parallel at dawn; Seoul has no tanks to stop them
Kim Il Sung's forces pour south into an almost entirely unprepared country; the U.N. Security Council condemns the invasion, and Truman moves toward committing U.S. troops.
1950Member story · 1776 Club
UN votes 9–0 to condemn North Korea's invasion; the Soviet seat sits empty
Ernest Gross presents Resolution 82 as ten North Korean divisions drive toward Seoul, and Moscow's self-imposed boycott leaves no one to cast a veto.
1960Member story · 1776 Club
Two NSA cryptologists surface in Moscow; they left Washington on 'vacation' ten weeks ago
Martin and Mitchell tell a Soviet press conference the U.S. has been intercepting allied communications and flying reconnaissance over foreign countries.
1976Member story · 1776 Club
Missouri rescinds its order to exterminate the Mormons; Bond signs a formal apology after 138 years
Governor Kit Bond voids Executive Order 44, Lilburn Boggs's 1838 command that Mormons be "exterminated or driven from the State," as part of the nation's Bicentennial celebrations.
1978Member story · 1776 Club
Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag rises over San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day parade for the first time
Eight stripes, hand-dyed and hand-stitched by thirty volunteers; Harvey Milk, who pushed Baker to make it, is in the crowd to see it fly.
1981Member story · 1776 Club
Gates and Allen convert a partnership to a corporation; Microsoft is now a Washington company on paper
Six years after selling BASIC out of Albuquerque, the firm behind MS-DOS swaps its garage-era legal structure for one built to scale.
1996Member story · 1776 Club
A sewage tanker packed with 5,000 pounds of explosives kills 19 U.S. airmen at Khobar Towers
The blast at 10:20 p.m. tears an 85-foot crater beside Building 131; 498 people of many nationalities are wounded, and the hole is already filling with seawater from the Gulf.
1997Member story · 1776 Club
NHL awards four expansion franchises; Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, and Minnesota to join the league
Bettman's push into the Sunbelt adds nearly 70,000 seats across cities that have never hosted professional hockey, with the first new team set to take the ice in 1998.
1998Member story · 1776 Club
Supreme Court strikes down the line-item veto, 6-3; Clinton loses a power no president before him had held
The Presentment Clause forbids the president from unilaterally excising provisions from enacted law, the Court rules, voiding cuts to a New York liability exemption and a Snake River potato-farmer tax break.
2009Member story · 1776 Club
Michael Jackson is dead at 50; he rehearsed at Staples Center just hours before
His physician, Conrad Murray, gave him propofol at his Holmby Hills home and did not call for help until nearly 90 minutes after finding him not breathing.
2013
CIA releases documents confirming a classified base at Groom Lake, Nevada exists
The disclosure, triggered by a Freedom of Information Act request filed eight years ago by a George Washington University researcher, answers narrow historical questions; current operations remain classified.
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