Tidbits of History, August 25

August 25 is:

Kiss and Make Up Day
National Whiskey Sour Day To make a whiskey sour: Combine 1 oz lemon juice with 1 oz sugar and 2 oz water to make the “sour mix”.
Then combine 1 1/2 ounces whiskey (or bourbon, Scotch, Canadian whiskey, or Irish whiskey) with 4 ounces of the sour mix. Pour over crushed ice and garnish with one maraschino cherry and a slice of orange.

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

1835 – The New York Sun perpetrated the Great Moon Hoax.. In a series of six articles, the paper reported that life and civilization had been discovered on the Moon.

Birthday of Bret Harte (August 25, 1836), American poet and novelist, famous for “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”

On August 25, 1914 – World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, was deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts were lost.

The United States National Park Service was created on August 25, 1916. At that time there were nine major parks including Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite, and Sequoia. Today there are 59 national parks and the Park Service employs 22,000 people. The Park Service oversees Parks, Monuments, Historic Sites, Recreation Areas, Trails, Seashores, and National Reserves.

Paris liberated August 25World War II: Paris was liberated by the Allies in 1944. Hitler had ordered that Paris “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris”.

In 1973, the first scan was made using CAT (Computer Assisted Tomography).

2017 – Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2004. Over the next few days, the storm causes catastrophic flooding throughout much of eastern Texas, killing 106 people and causing $125 billion in damage.

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