On this day, July 16 …

1969: Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

Also on this day:

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

1945: The United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, N.M. In 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."

1979: Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

1980: Ronald Reagan wins the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention in Detroit.

1999: John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, die when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunges into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

2004: Martha Stewart is 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.