Today is Friday, September 25, the 268th day of 2015. There are 97 days left in the year.

On this date:

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

In 1690, one of the earliest American newspapers, Publick Occurrences, published its first – and last – edition in Boston.

In 1775, American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen was captured by the British as he led an attack on Montreal. (Allen was released by the British in 1778.)

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 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.

In 1965, the first installment of “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote’s account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, appeared in The New Yorker. (The work was published in book form the following year.)

In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.