June 25 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on June 25

• George Orwell (1903)

  English novelist and essayist known for Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th century.

• George Michael (1963)

  English singer-songwriter known for his work with Wham! and a successful solo career including the album Faith.

• Carly Simon (1945)

  American singer-songwriter known for 'You're So Vain' and a long career in folk-pop music.

• Ricky Gervais (1961)

  English comedian, actor, and writer known for creating The Office and Extras.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900)

  French writer and aviator known for The Little Prince, one of the best-selling books in publishing history.

• Sonia Sotomayor (1954)

  American jurist and the first Latina justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed in 2009.

This Day in History

• 1876 — The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought in Montana Territory, resulting in the defeat and death of U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his forces at the hands of a coalition of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.

• 1950 — North Korean forces invaded South Korea across the 38th parallel, beginning the Korean War.

• 2009 — Michael Jackson died at his home in Los Angeles at age 50, from acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication, according to the Los Angeles County coroner.

• 1947 — The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank's diary, was first published in the Netherlands under its original title Het Achterhuis.

What June 25 Says About You

George Orwell, born June 25, 1903, spent his career writing with a clarity aimed directly at exposing propaganda and political dishonesty, and it's a strange kind of resonance that his birthday also marks one of the most mythologized and, in retrospect, most misrepresented military engagements in American history: the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on this date in 1876, in which Custer's forces were defeated by a coalition of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defending their own land and treaty rights, an event later reframed for decades in American popular culture as a tragic 'last stand' rather than what it more accurately was — a resounding defensive victory by Indigenous nations resisting further encroachment. Orwell would likely have had plenty to say about how quickly that narrative got rewritten. The Korean War's outbreak on this same date in 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, opened a conflict whose armistice, signed three years later, never became a formal peace treaty — meaning the two Koreas remain technically at war to this day, a fact many people are surprised to learn. Michael Jackson's death on this date in 2009 closed out one of the most commercially dominant and personally complicated careers in music history, a loss that triggered a genuinely global outpouring of grief and reassessment in roughly equal measure. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born June 25, 1900, wrote The Little Prince, a slim book that has since sold hundreds of millions of copies and been translated into more than 300 languages, its simple fable proving more durable than most of the century's heavier literature. Add the 2 and the 5 from the 25th and the digits land on day number 7, a figure numerology ties to introspection and depth — genuinely apt for a date whose defining events keep demanding a second, more careful look than their first popular telling offered. Pearl and rose remain June's steady symbols, but June 25's real character is built on revision: battles remembered wrongly, wars that never officially ended, and lives whose full complexity only became visible in hindsight. Sonia Sotomayor, born on this date in 1954, grew up in a Bronx public housing project before becoming the first Latina to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, a rise she has often described in terms of the same kind of overlooked, underestimated background that later got a fuller, more accurate telling — not unlike the corrective reckoning this date's own most famous battle eventually received.