On this day: July 16
The nation's capital is founded, the world gets its first parking meter, Joltin' Joe sets an unbreakable record and man heads to the moon, all on this day.
1377: Richard II of England is crowned king.
1377: Richard II of England is crowned king.
1661: The first banknotes in Europe are issued by the Swedish bank Stockholms Banco, a predecessor of the Bank of Sweden.
1769: Father Junipero Serra founds California's first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Over the following decades, it evolves into the city of San Diego.
1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" is performed for the first time.
1790: The District of Columbia is established as the capital of the United States after signature of the Residence Act.
1862: David Farragut is promoted to rear admiral, becoming the first officer in United States Navy to hold an admiral rank.
1882: Former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, dies at the age of 63 in Springfield, Ill.
1888: Baseball player "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, who would go on to play a disputed part in the 1919 "Chicago Black Sox" scandal, is born. Here he is pictured on the right in 1913 with Ty Cobb.
1907: Orville Redenbacher is born in Brazil, Ind.
1907: Actress Barbara Stanwyck ("The Lady Eve," "Double Indemnity") is born.
1911: Actress Ginger Rogers ("Kitty Foyle," "Top Hat") is born in Independence, Mo.
1935: The world's first parking meter is installed in Oklahoma City.
1941: Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as a MLB record.
1945: The leaders of World War II's three Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.
1945: The USS Indianapolis leaves San Francisco with parts for the atomic bomb "Little Boy" bound for Tinian Island. This would be the last time the Indianapolis would be seen by the mainland as she would be torpedoed by the Japanese Submarine I-58 on July 30 and sink with 880 out of 1,196 crewmen.
1945: The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, N.M., as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project.
1948: "Key Largo," starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Edward G. Robinson, is released.
1951: "The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger is published for the first time.
1956: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closes its very last "Big Tent" show in Pittsburgh. Due to changing economics all the company's subsequent circus shows will be held in arenas.
1957: U.S. Marine Maj. John Glenn flies a Vought F8U-1P Crusader supersonic jet from California to New York in three hours, 23 minutes and eight seconds, setting a new transcontinental speed record. Glenn received his fifth Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission.
1959: The Coasters record "Poison Ivy."
1960: The USS George Washington, a modified Skipjack class submarine, successfully test fires the first ballistic missile while submerged.
1963: Actress Phoebe Cates ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Gremlins") is born in New York City. She's seen here in 2009 with her husband, Kevin Kline.
1966: In London, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker form the band Cream.
1967: Actor and comedian Will Ferrell is born in Irvine, Calif.
1969: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
1971: Actor Corey Feldman ("The Lost Boys," "The Goonies") is born in Los Angeles.
1972: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles give their farewell concert in Washington, D.C.
1979: Iraqi President Hasan al-Bakr resigns and is replaced by Saddam Hussein.
1980: Ronald Reagan wins the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention in Detroit.
1981: Singer-songwriter Harry Chapin ("Cat's in the Cradle") dies in a car crash at the age of 38 in Jericho, N.Y. He was on his way to a benefit concert.
1993: San Francisco Giants outfielder Darren Lewis sets a major-league record with 267 consecutive errorless games, snapping Don Demeter's record. He would eventually run the streak to 392 games, a record that stands today.
1994: The first parts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy begin to hit Jupiter and would continue until July 22, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. The brown spots mark the places where the comet fragments tore through Jupiter's atmosphere.
1994: At the age of 26, Anna Nicole Smith weds 89-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall II. She's seen here in 2006 arriving at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., for a hearing in a lawsuit over Marshall's estate.
1999: John F. Kennedy, Jr., piloting a Piper Saratoga aircraft, dies when his plane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. His wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (pictured left) and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette are also killed.
2004: Chicago's Millennium Park is opened to the public by Mayor Richard M. Daley.
2004: Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge for lying about a stock sale.
2005: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth book in J. K. Rowling's best-selling series, is released. It sold nine million copies in the first 24 hours after its release, a record at the time that was eventually broken by its sequel, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
2011: President Barack Obama meets the Dalai Lama at the White House despite a warning from the People's Republic of China.
