1790: A site along the Potomac River was designated the permanent seat of the United States government; the area became Washington, D.C.

1945: The United States detonated its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, 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.

1951: The novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger was first published by Little, Brown and Co.

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.”

1969: Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy in Florida on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

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.

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.

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. (Casey Anthony was later acquitted at trial of killing Caylee, whose skeletal remains were found in December 2008; Casey was convicted of lying to police.