July 16 is the 197th day of the year (198th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 168 days remaining until the end of the year.
1769 - 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.
1779 - American Brigadier General Anthony Wayne launches a coup de main against British fortifications at Stony Point, New York, on the orders of General George Washington. He earns the moniker “Mad” Anthony Wayne for the ensuing maneuver.
1790- By 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 country’s first president: George Washington. It was Washington who saw the area’s potential economic and accessibility benefits due to the proximity of navigable rivers.
1861 – American Civil War: Under orders from Abraham Lincoln, Union troops begin a 25-mile march into Virginia for what will become the First Battle of the Bull Run.
1862 – American Civil War: David Farragut is promoted to rear admiral.
1918 - In Yekaterinburg, Russia, Czar Nicholas II and his family are executed by the Bolsheviks, bringing an end to the three-century- old Romanov dynasty.
1935 – The first parking meter is installed in Oklahoma City.
1945 – Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, US President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill meet in Potsdam to discuss the future of a defeated Germany after World War II.
1945 – First atomic bomb test occurs at Alamagordo, New Mexico.
1951 - J.D. Salinger’s only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is published by Little, Brown. 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 stories had already started appearing in the 1940s, many in The New Yorker.
1969- At 9:32 a.m. EDT, Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched on a historic journey to the surface of the moon. After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19.
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