Today in History....September 25

On this day in …


* 1493, Christopher Columbus set sail from Cadiz, Spain, with a flotilla of 17 ships on his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere

* 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific Ocean

* 1775, American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen was captured by the British as he led an attack on Montreal

* 1789, the first U.S. Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments became the Bill of Rights.)

* 1890, Wilford Woodruff, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, issued a Manifesto formally renouncing the practice of polygamy

* 1956, the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable went into service

* 1973, the three-man crew of the U.S. space laboratory Skylab 2 splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean after spending 59 days in orbit

* 1978, 144 people were killed when a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 and a private plane collided over San Diego

* 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court

* 2002, American schoolchildren escaped a rebel-held Ivory Coast city that was under siege as U.S. special forces and French troops moved in to rescue Westerners caught in the West African nation's bloody uprising

* 2006, British forces in Iraq shot and killed Omar al-Farouq, a leading al-Qaida terrorist, more than a year after he embarrassed the U.S. military by escaping from a maximum security military prison in Afghanistan. ALSO: Four French tourists kidnapped y practitioners of that "religion of peace" in Yemen were freed after more than two weeks in captivity