What happened on October 25 ?

1147 - The Portuguese, under Afonso I, and Crusaders from England and Flanders conquer Lisbon.

1415 - The army of Henry V of England defeats the French at the Battle of Agincourt.

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 Western Australian coast.

1747 - British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke defeats French at the second battle of Cape Finisterre.

1760 - George III becomes King of Great Britain

1813 - War of 1812: Canadians and Mohawks defeat the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.

1828 - The St Katharine Docks opened in London.

1854 - The Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).

1861 - The Toronto Stock Exchange was created.

1900 - The United Kingdom annexes the Transvaal.

1917 - The Bolshevik Revolution commences (according to the Julian calendar, which Russia used at the time of the Revolution. On the Gregorian calendar, the date was November 7).

1922 - The Dail of the Irish Free State approves the constitution of the new state, formally bringing it into being.

1923 - The United States Senate begins investigating the Teapot Dome scandal

1924 - The forged Zinoviev Letter is published in the Daily Mail, wrecking the British Labour Party's hopes of re-election.

1935 - Hurricane floods Haiti, killing over 2,000 people.

1936 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini create the Rome-Berlin Axis.

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".

1944 - Japan launches first kamikaze attacks, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf

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

1944 - The USS Tang (SS-306) under Richard O'Kane (the top submarine captain of World War II) is sunk by her own torpedo.

1944 - The Romanian Army liberates Carei, the last Romanian city under Axis Powers' occupation.

1945 - The Republic of China takes over administration of Taiwan following Japan's surrender to the Allies.

1962 - Cuban missile crisis: Adlai Stevenson shows photos at the UN proving Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba

1971 - The United Nations seated the People's Republic of China and expelled the Republic of China (see political status of Taiwan and China and the United Nations)

1972 - The Washington Post reports that White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman was the fifth person to control a secret cash fund designed to finance illegal political sabotage and espionage during the 1972 presidential election campaign (see also Watergate scandal)

1980 Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction conclude at The Hague

1983 - Operation Urgent Fury: The United States and its Caribbean allies invade Grenada, six days after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his supporters were executed in a coup d'état.

1986 - The New York Mets defeat the Boston Red Sox due to Bill Buckner's famous error in Game 6 of the World Series and go on to win the championship two days later.

1991 - History of Slovenia: Three months after the end of the Ten-Day War, the last soldier of the Yugoslav People's Army leaves the territory of the Republic of Slovenia.

1992 - Latvia establishes its first post-Soviet constitution.

1993 - Jean Chrétien becomes prime minister of Canada with a massive majority for his Liberal Party in a general election in which the governing Progressive Conservatives, led by Kim Campbell, lost 149 of 151 seats in the parliament.

1995 - A commuter train slams into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing seven students.

1997 - After a brief civil war which has driven President Pascal Lissouba out of Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso proclaims himself the President of the Republic of the Congo.

2003 - The Cedar Fire is reported at 5:37 pm. It becomes the largest wildfire in California history.

2003 - Australia defeat Namibia in the 2003 Rugby World Cup by a record 142 points to zero.

2004 - Fidel Castro, Cuba's President, announces that transactions using the American Dollar will be banned by November 8th.