A Blast from the Past

Today is Aug. 25.

On this date in 1985, a 13-year-old American schoolgirl named Samantha Smith, her father and six others died in a Maine plane crash. Two years earlier, Samatha had made headlines when she wrote to Soviet President Yuri Andropov, asking him why he wanted to conquer the world, or at least the United States. The letter was widely published in the Soviet Union and resulted in Andropov's personal invitation to Samantha to visit Moscow.

The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution on this date in 1920.

After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was at last liberated by American troops on this date in 1944. Opposition was light and the German commander defied an order by Hitler to blow up Paris' landmarks and burn the city to the ground before its liberation.

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The city of New Orleans was founded on this date in 1718 by Jean Baptiste LeMoyne. He named it for the French regent, the Duke of Orleans.

And after previously denying it used any such incendiary devices, the FBI admitted on this date in 1999 that it fired pyrotechnic tear-gas canisters at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, on the day in 1993 that the standoff came to a fiery end -- killing the more than 80 people inside. But it said the canisters bounced harmlessly off the compound's outer walls.

We now return you to the present, already in progress.