• 1790

  The District of Columbia was established as the seat of the United States government.

• 1918

  Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.

• 1935

  The first parking meters were installed in Oklahoma City.

• 1945

  The first atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, N.M.

• 1951

  J. D. Salinger's novel Catcher in the Rye was published.

• 1969

  Apollo 11 took off on the first manned flight to the moon.

• 1979

  Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

• 1999

  John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren, died in a plane crash near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.