Today in History, 10/25

1415: The army of Henry V of England defeats the French at the Battle of Agincourt.
1760: George III becomes King of Great Britain.1813: During the War of 1812, Canadians and Mohawks defeat the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.
1854: The "Charge of the Light Brigade" takes place during the Crimean War as an English brigade of more than 600 men, facing hopeless odds, charges the Russian army in the Battle of Balaclava and suffers heavy losses. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote one of his most famous poems about it.1881: Pablo Picasso is born.1891: Father Coughlin, radio demagogue, is born. He started out in radio in the 1930's as a very pro-FDR, pro-New Deal kind of guy but as time went on he became more and more pro-Fascist, pro-Nazi until his career cratered by the end of the decade.1912: Minnie Pearl is born. The price of her hat was $1.98.

1917: The Winter Palace in Petrograd, Russia is seized during the October Reveolution.
1924: Billy Barty is born. For about 50 years, if you needed a person of diminutive stature in your movie you called Billy Barty's agent.
1928: Marion Ross is born. She played Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days. I always suspected something was up between her and Fonzie.1936: Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini created 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: 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 the ship's own torpedo. In his defense, torpedoes of the day were notoriously unreliable.1957: Nancy Cartwright is born. She provides the voice of Bart Simpson.

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 Boston Red Sox lose Game 6 of the World Series to the New York Mets when a routine ground ball goes through Boston first baseman Bill Buckner's legs, allowing the winning run to score in the 10th inning. You can watch the play here. Many people feel that that Sox manager, John McNamara, should have put in the backup first baseman - Buckner was a good hitter, but his knees and ankles were shot. But, as my mother never said, "If ifs and buts were candy and nuts it'd be Christmas every day." And the Sox lost Game 7 anyway.Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.