October 25

285 – Execution of Saints Crispin and Crispinian during the reign of Diocletian, now the patron saints of leather workers, curriers, and shoemakers.

1616 – Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog makes second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at the later-named Dirk Hartog Island off the West Australian coast.

1861 – The Toronto Stock Exchange is created.

1938 – The Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounces swing music as “a degenerated musical system … turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fiber of young people”, warning that it leads down a “primrose path to hell”. His warning is widely ignored.

Adlai Stevenson shows aerial photos of Cuban missiles to the United Nations

1944 – Heinrich Himmler orders a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in Nazi Germany that had assisted army deserters and others to hide from the Third Reich.

1962 – Adlai Stevenson shows photos at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council proving that Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba.

1973 – Yom Kippur War officially ends with a ceasefire.

1977 – Digital Equipment Corporation releases OpenVMS V1.0.

1983 – In Operation Urgent Fury, the United States and its Caribbean allies invade Grenada, six days after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his supporters are executed in a coup d’état.

1811 – Évariste Galois, French mathematician and theorist, who laid the foundations of Galois theory, a branch of abstract algebra applied to cryptography, dying in a duel at the age of twenty. (d. 1832)

1875 – Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, American author and educator, graduate of Columbia’s Teacher College (d. 1961)

1910 – William Higinbotham, American physicist and video game designer (d. 1994)

1806 – Henry Knox, American general and politician, second United States Secretary of War (b. 1750)

1902 – Frank Norris, American journalist and novelist (b. 1870)

2013 – Paul Reichmann, Austrian-Canadian businessman, founded Olympia and York, the property development firm that built the World Financial Center (b. 1930)