Viet Cong blow up a floating restaurant

On June 25, 1864, four years into the Civil War, Pennsylvania troops for the Union, begin digging a tunnel toward the Rebels at Petersburg, Virginia, in order to blow a hole in the Confederate lines and break the stalemate. The great campaign between Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Ulysses S. […]

Congress passes the Mann Act, which was ostensibly aimed at keeping young women from being lured into prostitution, but really offered a way to make a crime out of many kinds of consensual sexual activity. The outrage over sex work began with a commission appointed in 1907 to investigate the problem of immigrant prostitutes. Allegedly, […]

On June 25, 1941, with World War II heating up in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8802 prohibiting ethnic and racial discrimination in the country’s growing defense industry. The order, issued after adamant protest by African American leaders, marked the U.S. government’s first move to ban employment discrimination and promote equal opportunity—and […]

On June 25, 1950, armed forces from communist North Korea smash into South Korea, setting off the Korean War. The United States, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, quickly sprang to the defense of South Korea and fought a bloody and frustrating war for the next three years. Korea, a former Japanese possession, […]

The last Packard—the classic American luxury car with the famously enigmatic slogan “Ask the Man Who Owns One”—rolls off the production line at Packard’s plant in Detroit, Michigan on June 25, 1956. Mechanical engineer James Ward Packard and his brother, William Dowd Packard, built their first automobile, a buggy-type vehicle with a single cylinder engine, […]

On June 25, 1988, 17-year-old Debbie Gibson becomes the youngest person ever to write, produce and perform her own #1 pop single when her single “Foolish Beat” reaches the top of the Biilboard Hot 100. Contrary to what some critics of teen pop might imagine, pop sensation Debbie Gibson saw herself not as the next […]

On June 25, 1996, a tanker truck loaded with 25,000 pounds of explosives rips through the U.S. Air Force military housing complex Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding nearly 500 others. The terrorist attack that blew off much of the eight-story Building 131, leaving a crater 50 feet wide […]