1787, the Constitutional Convention accepted the Great Compromise, the approval of a two-body legislature made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
1790, the District of Columbia was established as the permanent seat of the United States government
1907 Actress Barbara Stanwyck (Meet John Doe, Double Indemnity, The Big Valley, The Thorn Birds) is born. She dies in 1990.
1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas the Second, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.
1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb, in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was first published.
1964, in accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention conservative SenatorBarry Goldwater of Arizona said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
1969, the crew of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the Moon.
1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.
1979, Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq.
1994 Anna Nicole Smith, age 26, marries billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, age 89.
1999, 38-year-old John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, 33-year-old Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law, 34-year-old Lauren Bessette, were killed when the single-engine plane Kennedy was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard. After the plane’s wreckage was located on the ocean floor four days later, the bodies were retrieved and cremated, and their ashes were buried at sea on July 22.
1999 David Cone becomes the 16th pitcher in Major League history and the third New York Yankee to throw a perfect game, beating the Montreal Expos, 6-0.
2004, Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison for lying about a stock sale. She was also ordered to spend five months confined to her home and fined $30,000.