Today is July 16. On this date in:
1790
A site along the Potomac River was designated the permanent seat of the United States government; the area became Washington, D.C.
1926
Cincinnati’s Burnet House, one of the first modern hotels dating to 1850 and the site where Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman made plans to end the Civil War, closed.
1945
The United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico; the same day, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California on a secret mission to deliver atomic bomb components to Tinian Island in the Marianas.
1951
The novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger was published.
1957
Marine Corps Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record by flying a Crusader jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds.
1969
Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
1979
Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.
1981
Singer Harry Chapin was killed when his car was struck by a tractor-trailer on New York’s Long Island Expressway.
1999
John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
2002
The Irish Republican Army issued an unprecedented apology for the deaths of “noncombatants” over 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.
2004
Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge in New York for lying about a stock sale.
2008
Florida resident Casey Anthony, whose 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, had been missing a month, was arrested on charges of child neglect, making false official statements and obstructing a criminal investigation. (Casey Anthony was later acquitted at trial of murdering Caylee, whose skeletal remains were found in December 2008; she was convicted of lying to police.)
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