| On this date in: |
| 1787 |
New Jersey became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. |
| 1886 |
Baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb was born in Narrows, Ga. |
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| AP Photo |
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| 1892 |
Peter Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite” premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. |
| 1915 |
President Woodrow Wilson, widowed the year before, married Edith Bolling Galt. |
| 1944 |
The Supreme Court upheld the wartime relocation of Japanese-Americans. |
| 1957 |
The first nuclear facility in the United States to generate electricity, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, went online. |
| 1958 |
The world’s first communications satellite was launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket. |
| 1969 |
Britain’s Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder. |
| 1972 |
The United States began the heaviest bombing of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. |
| 1987 |
Ivan F. Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison for plotting Wall Street’s biggest insider-trading scandal. |
| 2003 |
A judge in Seattle sentenced confessed Green River killer Gary Ridgeway to 48 consecutive life terms. |
| 2003 |
A jury in Chesapeake, Va., convicted teenager Lee Boyd Malvo of two counts of murder in the Washington-area sniper shootings. (He was later sentenced to life in prison without parole.) |
| 2008 |
A U.N. court in Tanzania convicted former Rwandan army Col. Theoneste Bagosora of genocide and crimes against humanity for masterminding the killings of more than half a million people in a 100-day slaughter in 1994. |
| 2009 |
Reality TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin, parents of eight children, divorced. |
