Today in History: August 25, deaths of McCain and Kennedy

Today in History Today is Thursday, Aug. 25, the 237th day of 2022. There are 128 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On Aug. 25, 2018, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who had spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before a 35-year political career that took him to the Republican presidential nomination, died at the age of 81 after battling brain cancer for more than a year. On this date: In 1718, hundreds of French colonists arrived in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans. In 1875, Capt. Matthew Webb became the first person to swim across the English Channel, getting from Dover, England, to Calais (ka-LAY’), France, in 22 hours. In 1928, an expedition led by Richard E. Byrd set sail from Hoboken, N.J., on its journey to Antarctica. In 1944, during World War II, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation. In 1958, the game show ‘œConcentration’� premiered on NBC-TV. In 1980, the Broadway musical ‘œ42nd Street’� opened. (Producer David Merrick stunned the cast and audience during the curtain call by announcing that the show’s director, Gower Champion, had died earlier that day.) In 1981, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 came within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet. In 1985, Samantha Smith, 13, the schoolgirl whose letter to Yuri V. Andropov resulted in her famous peace tour of the Soviet Union, died with her father in an airliner crash in Auburn, Maine, that also killed four other passengers and two crew members. In 2001, R&B singer Aaliyah (ah-LEE’-yah) was killed with eight others in a plane crash in the Bahamas; she was 22. In 2009, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the U.S. Senate, died at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a battle with a brain tumor. In 2014, a funeral was held in St. Louis for Michael Brown, the Black 18-year-old who was shot to death by a police officer in suburban Ferguson. In 2020, two people were shot to death and a third was wounded as 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle during a third night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake. (Rittenhouse, who was taken into custody in Illinois the next day, said he was defending himself after the three men attacked him as he tried to protect businesses from protesters; he was acquitted on all charges, including homicide.) Ten years ago: Neil Armstrong, 82, who commanded the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing and was the first man to set foot on the moon in July 1969, died in Cincinnati, Ohio. Five years ago: Hurricane Harvey, the fiercest hurricane to hit the U.S. in more than a decade, made landfall near Corpus Christi, Texas, with 130 mph sustained winds; the storm would deliver five days of rain totaling close to 52 inches, the heaviest tropical downpour that had ever been recorded in the continental U.S. The hurricane left at least 68 people dead and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage in Texas. President Donald Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge for defying a judge’s orders that he stop conducting immigration patrols; the 85-year-old retired lawman had faced the prospect of jail time at his sentencing in October.