Roman historians, most notably Varro, calculated that Rome was founded on this date in 753 BC, the day Romulus supposedly plowed a sacred furrow around the Palatine Hill to mark the city's boundary. The date became fixed in Roman civic religion, celebrated annually as the Parilia festival honoring the city's birth.

The printing press, barely two decades old, began transforming how literature spread across Europe. An edition of Dante's masterwork completed around this date in Foligno was among the earliest printed versions of the poem, part of the wave that took vernacular Italian literature out of expensive hand-copied manuscripts and into wider circulation.

Barely two years after Alexander Graham Bell's patent, the New Haven District Telephone Company distributed a modest single sheet listing 50 subscribers, the world's first telephone directory. It included no phone numbers, since callers simply asked an operator to connect them by name, an artifact of just how new and small the telephone network still was.

In the early hours of April 25, 1915, British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops landed on the rugged shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula, hoping to seize the Dardanelles and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. Fierce Ottoman resistance, led in part by a then-obscure colonel named Mustafa Kemal, pinned the invaders to narrow, blood-soaked beachheads for eight brutal months.

Patrols from the US First Army and the Soviet Red Army met on a shattered bridge over the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany, on April 25, 1945. The meeting, later staged for photographs of soldiers shaking hands and embracing, symbolized the collapse of Nazi Germany, now cut in half by advancing Allied and Soviet forces closing in from east and west.

Junior military officers launched a coup before dawn on April 25, 1974, seizing key sites in Lisbon and ending 48 years of authoritarian rule under the Estado Novo regime. Civilians flooded the streets in celebration, tucking red carnations into soldiers' rifles, giving the uprising its enduring name: the Carnation Revolution.

Astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit roughly 340 miles above Earth on April 25, 1990. Despite an early flaw in its main mirror that blurred its first images, later corrected by a dramatic 1993 spacewalk repair, Hubble went on to capture some of the most iconic images in the history of astronomy.

Taking advantage of Olympic-fueled distraction and thin security, burglars used a ladder to smash a gallery window and grab The Scream, one of the most recognizable images in Western art. They left behind a mocking note thanking the museum for its poor security. The painting was recovered undamaged three months later.

Beginning on April 26 for most voters but opening for special early voting on April 25, 1994, South Africans of every race lined up for hours, some for the first time in their lives, to cast ballots in the country's first fully democratic election. The vote ended decades of apartheid rule and delivered a decisive victory to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.