A 9 year old’s murder puts an innocent man in jail

In a macabre instance of rough frontier justice, California Rangers inspired by a $6,000 award bring in the severed head—preserved in whiskey—of outlaw Joaquín Murrieta. Or at least that’s what they claimed. In the early months of 1853, a wild band of desperadoes began terrorizing Calaveras County in central California. Law officers believed a shadowy […]

On July 25, 1897, 21-year-old Jack London leaves for the Klondike region of far-northern Canada to join the gold rush, where he will write his first successful stories. London was born in San Francisco in 1876. His father, an astrologer named Chaney, abandoned the family, and his mother, a spiritualist and music teacher, remarried. Jack […]

In Paris, France, on July 25, 1917, the exotic dancer and suspected secret agent Mata Hari is sentenced to death by a French court for purportedly spying on Germany’s behalf during World War I. Since 1903, Margueretha Gertruida Zelle, born in a small town in northern Holland and formerly married to a captain in the […]

On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, is voted out of power by his own Grand Council and arrested upon leaving a meeting with King Vittorio Emanuele, who tells Il Duce that the war is lost. Mussolini responded to it all with an uncharacteristic meekness. During the evening of July 24 and […]

On July 25, 1961, in a televised address to the American people about the Berlin Crisis, President John F. Kennedy speaks soberly about the need for nuclear fallouts shelters. He announces that he has instructed Congress to identify spaces that could be used as bomb shelters, and to stock them with “minimal essentials for survival” […]

President Richard Nixon announces that henceforth the United States will expect its Asian allies to tend to their own military defense. The Nixon Doctrine, as the president’s statement came to be known, clearly indicated his determination to “Vietnamize” the Vietnam War. When Richard Nixon took office in early 1969, the United States had been at […]

On July 25, 1985, Rock Hudson, a quintessential tall, dark and handsome Hollywood leading man of the 1950s and 1960s who made more than 60 films during his career, announces through a press release that he is suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). With that announcement, Hudson became the first major celebrity to go […]

An Air France Concorde jet crashes upon takeoff in Paris on July 25, 2000, killing 109 passengers and crew onboard as well as four people on the ground. The Concorde, the world’s fastest commercial jet, had enjoyed an exemplary safety record up to that point, with no crashes in the plane’s 31-year history. Air France […]