There are 97 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Sept. 25, 1957, nine Black students who’d been forced to withdraw from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, because of unruly white crowds were escorted to class by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
On this date:
In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific Ocean.
In 1789, the first United States Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments became the Bill of Rights.)
In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, during a national speaking tour in support of the Treaty of Versailles (vehr-SY’).
In 1956, the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable officially went into service with a three-way ceremonial call between New York, Ottawa and London.
In 1964, the situation comedy “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” starring Jim Nabors, premiered on CBS-TV.
In 1978, 144 people were killed when a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 and a private plane collided over San Diego.
In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.
In 1992, NASA’s Mars Observer blasted off on a $980 million mission to the red planet (the probe disappeared just before entering Martian orbit in August 1993).
In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin began a five-day swing through the United States as he arrived in New York, hoping to encourage American investment in his country’s struggling economy.
In 2016, golf legend Arnold Palmer, 87, died in Pittsburgh. Jose Fernandez, 24, ace right-hander for the Miami Marlins, was killed in a boating accident with two friends off Miami Beach. Country singer Jean Shepard, a Grand Old Opry staple, died in Nashville at 82.
In 2018, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home. (After nearly three years in prison, Cosby went free in June 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction.)
In 2020, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, making history as the first woman so honored in America. Gov. Ron DeSantis lifted all restrictions on restaurants and other businesses in Florida and banned local fines against people who refused to wear masks as he sought to reopen the state’s economy despite the spread of the coronavirus.
