Today is Thursday, July 16, the 197th day of 2026. On this day in history, the United States detonated its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945.
Other Notable Events
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 1951, the novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger was first published by Little, Brown and Co. In 1957, Marine Corps Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record by flying a Vought F8U Crusader jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds.
In 1964, 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’ as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco. In 1969, Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy in Florida on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
In 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.
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. In 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.
In 2015, a jury in Centennial, Colorado, convicted James Holmes of 165 counts of murder, attempted murder and other charges in the 2012 Aurora movie theater rampage that left 12 people dead. In 2017, 10 people died at a popular swimming hole in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest after a rainstorm unleashed a flash flood.
In 2018, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, President Donald Trump openly questioned the finding of his own intelligence agencies that Russia had meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to his benefit.
Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.
