The first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper. The fictional stories became known as "The Great Moon Hoax."

The outlaw Bill Doolin is killed by a posse at Lawson, Oklahoma on the night of August 25, 1896.  Born in Arkansas in 1858, William Doolin was never as hardened a criminal as some of his companions. He went west in 1881, finding work in Oklahoma at the big ranch of Oscar D. Halsell. Halsell took a […]

On August 25, 1931, after months of torrential flooding, levees around the city of Gaoyou, China, break and the Yangtze River overflows, killing between 10,000 and 15,000 in a single night. The disastrous breach was part of a catastrophic flood that killed an estimated 3.7 million people directly and indirectly over the next several months, […]

On August 25, 1944, after more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison, defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris’ landmarks and burn the […]

On August 25, 1950, in anticipation of a crippling strike by railroad workers, President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order putting America’s railroads under the control of the U.S. Army, as of August 27, at 4:00 pm. Truman had already intervened in another railway dispute when union employees of the Chicago, North Shore and […]

On August 25, 1962, a diminutive, 17-year-old singer named Eva Narcissus Boyd scored her first and only #1 pop hit with “The Loco-Motion.” Her success certainly came from her abundant talent and a great capacity for hard work, but it was helped along by being in the right place at the right time. Eva Boyd […]

On August 25, 1979, the storm that will become Hurricane David forms near Cape Verde off the African coast in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It would go on to devastate the island of Dominica, and then the Dominican Republic, killing at least 2,000 people. On August 27, two days after forming, the storm reached hurricane […]

Truman Capote, the author of the pioneering true-crime novel In Cold Blood, dies at age 59 in Los Angeles. In Cold Blood told the story of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, two parolees from the Kansas State Penitentiary, decided to rob Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer, […]

On August 25, 2009, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts from 1962 to 2009, dies of brain cancer at age 77 at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy, one of the longest-serving senators in American history, was a leader of the Democratic Party […]