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TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Thursday, July 16, the 198th day of 2020. There are 168 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 16, 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo (ahlah-moh- GOHR’-doh), New Mexico; the same day, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left Mare (mar-AY’) Island Naval Shipyard in California on a secret mission to deliver atomic bomb components to Tinian Island in the Marianas.
On this date:
In 1557, Anne of Cleves, who was briefly the fourth wife of England’s King Henry VIII, died in London at age 41.
In 1790, a site along the Potomac River was designated the permanent seat of the United States government; the area became Washington, D.C.
In 1862, Flag Officer David G. Farragut became the first rear admiral in the United States Navy.
In 1964, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
In 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.
In 1980, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Detroit.
In 1994, the first of 21 pieces of comet ShoemakerLevy 9 smashed into Jupiter, to the joy of astronomers awaiting the celestial fireworks.
In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette ( bihSEHT’), died when their single- engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
In 2002, the Irish Republican Army issued an unprecedented apology for the deaths of “noncombatants” over 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.
In 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.