Father Junípero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan missionary, founds the first Catholic mission in California on the site of present-day San Diego. After Serra blessed his new outpost of Christianity in a high mass, the royal standard of Spain was unfurled over the mission, which he named San Diego de Alcala. Serra came to Spanish America […]

On July 16, 1790, in signing the Residence Act, the young American Congress declares that a swampy, humid, muddy and mosquito-infested site on the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia will be the nation’s permanent capital. “Washington,” in the newly designated federal “District of Columbia,” was named after the leader of the American Revolution and […]

The world’s first parking meter, known as Park-O-Meter No. 1, is installed on the southeast corner of what was then First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on July 16, 1935. The parking meter was the brainchild of a man named Carl C. Magee, who moved to Oklahoma City from New Mexico in […]

J.D. Salinger’s only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is published by Little, Brown on July 16, 1951. The book, about a confused teenager disillusioned by the adult world, is an instant hit and will be taught in high schools for decades. The 31-year-old Salinger had worked on the novel for a decade. His […]

On July 16 ,1973—a little more than a year after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel led to a widening scandal—explosive news is revealed during a live broadcast of the Watergate hearings in the Senate: A secret taping system inside the White House had recorded all of President Richard Nixon’s telephone calls and in-person conversations. […]

More than 1,000 people are killed when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake strikes Luzon Island in the Philippines on July 16, 1990. The massive tremor wreaked havoc across a sizeable portion of Luzon, the country’s largest island, with Baguio City suffering the most devastating effects. The epicenter of the quake, which struck at 4:26 p.m., was north […]

On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr.; his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy; and her sister, Lauren Bessette, die when the single-engine plane that Kennedy was piloting crashes into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., was born on November 25, 1960, just a few weeks after his father and namesake […]