Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/April 25
April 25: Great Friday (Eastern Christianity, 2008); Arbor Day in the United States (2008); ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand; Liberation Day in Italy; Red Hat Society Day
- 1719 – Robinson Crusoe, a novel by English author Daniel Defoe (pictured) about a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, was first published.
- 1792 – The guillotine was first used to carry out capital punishment in France, with crowds marvelling at the machine's speed and precision.
- 1898 – Spanish-American War: The United States retroactively declared war on Spain, stating that a state of war between the two countries had already existed for the past couple of days.
- 1953 – Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid by molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick was first published in the scientific journal Nature, describing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
- 1983 – Cold War: Replying to her letter in which she expressed her fears about the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov invited American schoolgirl Samantha Smith to visit Moscow, Leningrad and the Artek Young Pioneer camp.