Today in HistoryToday is Monday, July 16, the 197th day of 2007. There are 168 days left in the year.

ON THIS DATE<$>

In 1790, the District of Columbia was established as the seat of the US government.

In 1918, the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was murdered together with his family and entourage by Bolshevik revolutionaries at Yekaterinburg.

In 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb — a plutonium weapon code-named “Trinity”, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

In 1964, in accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

In 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Fla., on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard.

In 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.

In 1997, FBI agents, some handing out photos in gay bars and hotels, blanketed South Florida in the continuing hunt for alleged prostitute-turned-serial killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan, suspected of gunning down designer Gianni Versace.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (1904-1967).