July 25
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1965: When Dylan plugged in
On this day in 1965, Bob Dylan walked onstage at the Newport Folk Festival and changed popular music. His acoustic songs, filled with poetic lyrics and social commentary, had made him a hero to folk purists. But he was moving in a different direction, blending traditional folk songwriting with electric instruments. While the reaction at Newport was mixed—some booed, while others cheered—Dylan’s performance marked a turning point not only in his career but also for popular music: the boundaries between genres were blurring, and song lyrics were becoming more ambitious and literary.
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Near Niagara Falls on this day in 1814, British troops commanded by General Phineas Riall thwarted an invasion of Canada by a U.S. force under General Jacob Brown in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane during the War of 1812. [How much do you know about the history of war?]
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Album/Alamy
Thomas Eakins—who carried the tradition of 19th-century American realism to perhaps its highest achievement, exemplified by such works as The Gross Clinic (1875) and The Agnew Clinic (1888)—was born this day in 1844.
Famous Birthdays
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© Arun Sankar—AFP/Getty Images
2026
India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned following massive Gen Z protests over the mismanagement of college-level qualifying examinations; the Cockroach Janta Party and activist Sonam Wangchuk played key roles in the demonstrations.
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs/U.S. Department of State
2007
Indian lawyer and politician Pratibha Patil was sworn in as president of India, becoming the first woman to hold the office. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about India.]
Toshihiko Sato/AP Images
2000
A Concorde supersonic airplane—Air France flight 4590—crashed outside Paris, killing all 109 people on board and four others on the ground; the event was believed to have hastened the end of all Concorde operations three years later.
www.spacefacts.de
1984
Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space. [Take our quiz about famous astronauts and cosmonauts.]
© Stuart Atkins/Shutterstock.com
1978
Louise Brown, the first human conceived using in vitro fertilization, was born in England. [Test your knowledge of medical conditions and discoveries.]
Image: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1919
A member of the foreign ministry of the newly formed Soviet government, Lev Karakhan, issued the Karakhan Manifesto, in which he offered to relinquish all Soviet claims to the special rights and privileges in China won by the Russian tsarist government. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about Russia.]
Frank Driggs Collection/© Archive Photos
1906
Johnny Hodges—a jazz alto saxophonist who was a featured soloist in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, known for his brilliant improvisational sense of composition—was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Test your knowledge of music.]
Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London
1834
English Romantic poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge died. [Take our quiz about the life and works of English authors.]