Published
On this day, Sept. 25 ...
2018: Bill Cosby is sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home.
Also on this day:
- 1789: The first United States Congress adopts 12 amendments to the Constitution and sends them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments would become the Bill of Rights.)
- 1911: Ground is broken for Boston's Fenway Park.
- 1956: The first trans-Atlantic telephone cable officially goes into service with a three-way ceremonial call between New York, Ottawa and London.
- 1957: Nine Black students who were forced to withdraw from Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., because of unruly White crowds are escorted to class by members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
- 1962: Sonny Liston knocks out Floyd Patterson in round one to win the world heavyweight title at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
- 1965: The first installment of "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan., appears in The New Yorker. (The work would be published in book form the following year.)
- 1981: Sandra Day O'Connor is sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.
- 1992: NASA's Mars Observer blasts off on a $980 million mission to the red planet (the probe would disappear just before entering Martian orbit in August 1993).
- 1997: President Bill Clinton pulls open the door of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., as he welcomed nine Blacks who had faced hate-filled mobs 40 years earlier.
- 2014: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announces his resignation.
- 2014: Derek Jeter caps off his Yankee Stadium farewell with a game-winning single in the bottom of the ninth inning to give New York a 6-5 victory over the Baltimore Orioles.