Today in History: July 25

Today is Thursday, July 25, the 207th day of 2024. There are 159 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On July 25, 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing more than 100 of them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

Also on this date:

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

In 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest. (He was later rescued by the Nazis and re-asserted his authority.)

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

In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)

In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina that had been the scene of nearly six months of sit-in protests against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

In 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.

In 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.

In 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.

In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

In 2018, a study published in the journal Science revealed that a huge lake of salty water appears to be buried deep in Mars, raising the possibility of finding life on the planet.

In 2019, President Donald Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he solicited Zelenskyy’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden; that night, a staff member at the White House Office of Management and Budget signed a document that officially put military aid for Ukraine on hold.

In 2022, on a visit to Canada, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with the country’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

Today’s Birthdays: Elizabeth Francis, the oldest living American, is 114. Folk-pop singer-musician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 82. Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 81. Reggae singer Rita Marley is 78. Musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 73. Model-actor Iman is 69. Rock musician Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) is 66. Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 65. Actor Matt LeBlanc is 57. Actor Wendy Raquel Robinson is 57. Actor David Denman is 51. Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 50. Actor James Lafferty (TV: “One Tree Hill”) is 39. Actor Meg Donnelly (TV: “American Housewife”) is 24.