THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― AUGUST 25

August 25 is the 237th day of the year (238th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 128 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).

NATIONAL KISS AND MAKE UP DAY 

1543 – The first Europeans bearing firearms arrive in Japan. 

1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1758 – Seven Years' War: Frederick II of Prussia defeats the Russian army at the Battle of Zorndorf.

1894 – Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.

1914 – World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.

1916 – The United States National Park Service is created.

1942 – World War II: second day of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. A Japanese naval transport convoy headed towards Guadalcanal is turned-back by an Allied air attack, losing one destroyer and one transport sunk, and one light cruiser heavily damaged.

1944 – World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.

1950 – President Harry Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize control of the nation's railroads to avert a strike.

1981 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn.

1989 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune, the second to last planet in the Solar System at the time.

1991 – Belarus gains its independence from the Soviet Union.

1991 – Linus Torvalds announces the first version of what will become Linux.

1997 – Egon Krenz, the former East German leader, is convicted of a shoot-to-kill policy at the Berlin Wall.

2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space becoming the first man-made object to do so.


TODAY'S BIRTHS

1744 – Johann Gottfried Herder, German poet, philosopher, and critic (d. 1803)

1819 – Allan Pinkerton, Scottish-American detective and spy, created the Pinkerton National Detective Agency

1836 – Bret Harte, American short story writer and poet (d. 1902)

1916 – Frederick Chapman Robbins, American pediatrician and virologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2003)

1918 – Leonard Bernstein, American pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1990)

1938 – Frederick Forsyth, English journalist and author (d. 1884)

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.