By The Associated Press

Today in History

Today is Thursday, June 25, the 177th day of 2020. There are 189 days left in the year.

Todayís Highlight in History:

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. Colonel George A. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana.

On this date:

In 1788, Virginia ratified the U.S. Constitution.

In 1867, barbed wire was patented by Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio.

In 1910, President William Howard Taft signed the White-Slave Traffic Act, more popularly known as the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for ìimmoralî purposes.

In 1942, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was designated Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations during World War II. Some 1,000 British Royal Air Force bombers raided Bremen, Germany.

In 1947, ìThe Diary of a Young Girl,î the personal journal of Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl hiding with her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, was first published.

In 1950, war broke out in Korea as forces from the communist North invaded the South.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that recitation of a state-sponsored prayer in New York State public schools was unconstitutional.

In 1973, former White House Counsel John W. Dean began testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee, implicating top administration officials, including President Richard Nixon as well as himself, in the Watergate scandal and cover-up.

In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its first ìright-to-dieî decision, ruled that family members could be barred from ending the lives of persistently comatose relatives who had not made their wishes known conclusively.

In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Americans and injured hundreds at a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia.

In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America threatened to sue hundreds of individual computer users who were illegally sharing music files online.

In 2009, death claimed Michael Jackson, the ìKing of Pop,î in Los Angeles at age 50 and actress Farrah Fawcett in Santa Monica, California, at age 62.

— — —