25th of August

It is the 237th day of the year with 128 days remaining until the new year.

383 - Gratian, the great Roman Emperor dies at 84 years of age.

1530 - Ivan IV Vasilyevich, also known as "Ivan the Terrible," Tsar of All Russia is born.

1537 - The Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British Army, and the second most senior, is formed.

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

1825 - Uruguay declares its independence from Brazil.

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

1898 - 700 Greek civilians, 17 British guards, and the British Consul of Crete are killed by a Turkish mon in Heraklion, Greece.

1900 - German philosopher, known for his style on radical questioning and the value of objectivity of truth, Friedrich Nietzche is born.

1911 - Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnamese general and statesman is born.

1914 - The University Library 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.

1933 - The Diexi earthquake strikes Mao County, Sichuan, China, and kills nearly 9,000 people.

1942 - The 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.  The Imperial Navy loses one destroyer, one transport, and one light cruiser heavily damaged.

1944 - The city of Paris, France is liberated from German occupation by Allied forces.

1946 - American Major League Baseball relief pitcher, Rollie Fingers is born.

1948 - The House Un-American Activities Committee, holds its first-ever televised congressional hearing between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

1949 - American musician, most famous as the bassist of the rock band KISS, Gene Simmons is born.

1958 - Tim Burton, American film director, producer, writer and artist, know for his dark, quirky-themed movies, is born.

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

1984 - Waite Hoyt, one of the most dominant pitcher's of the 1920s, dies at the age of 84.

1989 - Voyager 2, now makes its closest approach to Neptune, the outermost planet in the solar system.

1991 - Belarus declares its independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

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

2009 - Edward "Ted" Kennedy, United States Senator from Massachusetts, serving almost 47 years, and was from the prominent Kennedy family, passes away at the age of 77.