On July 16, 1790, the District of Columbia was established as the seat of the United States government.
In 1821 Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, was born in Bow, N.H.
In 1867 D.R. Averill of Newburg, Ohio, was granted a patent for ready-mixed paint.
In 1872 Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen was born.
In 1918 Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.
In 1935 the first automatic parking meters were installed, in Oklahoma City.
In 1942, in the largest roundup of Jews during the Vichy government, police in France began arresting 16,000 Jews, who were sent to Nazi camps. (Eventually, the Vichy government deported 76,000 Jews to death camps; only 2,500 of them survived.)
In 1945 the first experimental atomic bomb was exploded over the desert near Alamogordo, N.M.
In 1957 Marine Maj. John Glenn established a transcontinental speed record, piloting a jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes, 8 seconds.
In 1969 Apollo 11, the first moon-landing mission, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins.
In 1973 a former White House aide confirmed that many of President Richard Nixon’s meetings and telephone conversations at the executive mansion had been secretly recorded.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter took his energy-independence proposals on the road, making speeches in Kansas City and Detroit.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan was nominated for president at the Republican Natinal Conventiion in Detroit.
In 1985 Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens resigned amid political controversy over responsibility for soccer stadium violence in which 38 people died in Brussels on May 29.
In 1993 the floodwaters of the Mississippi River charged through a levee at West Quincy, Mo., closing the Bayview Bridge, the only bridge across the river to Illinois for more than 200 miles.
