January 25

1554 – São Paulo, (Saint Paul) Brazil, is founded.

1585 – Walter Raleigh is knighted, shortly after renaming a region of North America “Virginia”, in honor of Queen Elizabeth I.

1787 – In the largest action of Shays’s Rebellion, Shaysites march on the federal Springfield Armory in an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry with 4 killed and 20 wounded.

1819 – The University of Virginia is chartered, with Thomas Jefferson one of its founders.

1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Bell Telephone Company of New York and the Anglo-Indian Telephone Company, Ltd with licenses to sell telephones in Greece, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, China, ‘and other Asian countries’.

1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

1945 – The ‘Battle of the Bulge’ ends with the final collapse of the German  offensive in the Ardennes

1947 – Thomas Goldsmith Jr. files a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, which simulates firing an artillery shell, the first ever electronic game.

1961 – In Washington, D.C., President Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference.

1971 – Charles Manson and three female “Family” members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders.

1990 – Avianca Flight 52, a Boeing 707, en route from from Bogotá, Colombia, to New York City crashes in Cove Neck, New York, while attempting to land, killing 73 of the 158 passengers and crew on board.

1993 – Outside CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Mir Aimal Kansi shoots and kills 2 CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a stoplight, wounding 3 others.

1996 – In Delaware, Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be executed by hanging in the U.S.

1999 – A 6.2 magnitude earthquake centered about 25 miles west south west of Ibagué, Colombia kills at least 1,000.

2019 – A Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine tailing dam collapses in Brumadinho, Brazil, killing at least 7 people and leaving 200 missing.