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1960
February: Four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College at Greensboro stage a "sit-in" at the segregated lunch counter of a local Woolworth's. Sit-ins throughout the South ensue. In a speech at a rally in Durham, Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says, "What is new is that American students have come of age. You now take your honored places in the worldwide struggle for freedom."
April: The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded at a meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
May: The U.S.S.R. downs a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory and captures the pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
President Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which had been passed in the Senate largely through the efforts of Senate Democratic leader Lyndon B. Johnson, despite strong opposition from other Southern political leaders.
The Food and Drug Administration approves Enovid, the first birth control pill.
June: A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Negro American Labor Council, and Martin Luther King, Jr., call for pickets at the Democratic and Republican national conventions to protest what they term the inadequacy of the 1960 Civil Rights Act.
September: John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon participate in the first televised debates between presidential candidates.
October: Paul Goodman publishes Growing Up Absurd, in which he notes that "among all young people it is perhaps just the young people in the South, whites and Negroes both, who most find life worth living these days, because something real is happening."
The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing publishes The Divided Self, which he describes as showing "that schizophrenia was one position, one way of seeing things, and that normality was another."
November: John F. Kennedy is elected president in one of the closest elections in United States history. He receives 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.5 percent. Kennedy, who is forty-three, is the second-youngest and first Roman Catholic president.
Richard Wright, the author of Black Boy (1945) and White Man, Listen! (1957), dies in Paris at the age of fifty-two.
December: The National Liberation Front (NLF), an alliance of opponents to the regime of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, is formed. There are nine hundred American military personnel stationed in South Vietnam.
1961
January: Bob Dylan leaves Minnesota for New York and becomes a fixture in Greenwich Village coffeehouses.
The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Cuba, two years after Fidel Castro took power.
In his inaugural speech as the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy declares, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
March: President Kennedy issues an executive order establishing the Peace Corps, which will send volunteers to help develop agricultural and educational programs in poor countries.
April: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to orbit the earth.
An invasion force of some fifteen hundred anti-Castro Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA, lands at the Bay of Pigs. They are defeated in less than three days by Castro's forces. President Kennedy assumes responsibility for the fiasco.
May: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organizes "Freedom Rides" to the South to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court's ruling that it is unconstitutional to apply state segregation laws to interstate transport. Busloads of interracial Freedom Riders are set upon by white mobs at several stops, and the scale of the violence prompts Attorney General Robert Kennedy to dispatch a protective force of six hundred U.S. marshals.
June: The Soviet ballet star Rudolf Nureyev defects to the West.
August: The parliament of the German Democratic Republic votes to build a wall sealing off the border between East and West Berlin.
September: The U.S.S.R. breaks a three-year moratorium on nuclear testing.
October: Joseph Heller publishes Catch-22, a satirical novel about a World War II bomber group.
December: American pilots begin flying combat missions in attack aircraft in Vietnam. On December 22, the first American soldier is killed. There are 3,200 American military personnel in South Vietnam.
1962
February: The Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) headquarters is established in Saigon to control the buildup of U.S. advisers and support personnel.
Marine Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth.
April: The United States explodes a nuclear device near Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean.
May: The Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, who was the director of Jewish affairs for the Central Office of Reich Security in Germany during World War II, is hanged in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.
June: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) holds its first national convention at an AFL-CIO camp near Port Huron, Michigan. The group's manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which endorses the labor, civil rights, peace, and student movements, is prepared from a draft written by Tom Hayden.
The Supreme Court rules in Engel v. Vitale that the practice of reading prayers in New York public schools is unconstitutional.
August: Marilyn Monroe dies of an overdose of sleeping pills in her Hollywood home at the age of thirty-six.
The United States national debt reaches $300,000,000,000.
September: James Meredith, a black man whose right to be admitted to the University of Mississippi at Oxford has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, is escorted to Oxford by 170 U.S. marshals. Riots break out and two men are killed, but Meredith is successfully enrolled in the previously segregated school.
Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, about the effect of pollution caused by pesticides. It is an influential critique of a culture that tampers with the ecosystem without understanding the consequences.
October: U.S. aerial surveillance discovers that sites for Soviet nuclear missiles are being built in Cuba, and on October 22 President Kennedy threatens a retaliatory nuclear strike against the Soviet Union if missiles are used. A naval blockade of Cuba is established and the U.S. military is put on alert. During negotiations between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane is shot down while flying over Cuba. On October 28 Khrushchev agrees to dismantle and remove the missiles under UN supervision. Kennedy agrees to remove American missiles based in Turkey and lift the naval blockade of Cuba.
November: The Esalen Institute, which is devoted to "the exploration of unrealized human capacities," is founded in Big Sur, California.
Former vice-president Richard Nixon, who has been defeated by Edmund Brown in the California gubernatorial race, holds a press conference to announce his departure from politics, saying, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."
The New Yorker publishes James Baldwin's essay "Letter From a Region in My Mind." It will appear the following year in The Fire Next Time.
December: There are 11,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam.
1963
February: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.
March: The first major exhibition of pop art, "Six Painters and the Object," opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol.
April: Martin Luther King, Jr., who has remarked that when he is in Birmingham, Alabama, he feels that he is "within a cab ride of being in Johannesburg, South Africa," writes "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" after he is arrested and incarcerated during a civil rights campaign.
May: After two bombings in Birmingham aimed at civil rights leaders, the first full-scale urban riot of the decade breaks out.
Bob Dylan's first album of original songs, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is released. It includes "Blowin' in the Wind."
June: A Buddhist monk commits suicide by self-immolation in Saigon to protest the anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese government.
Two black students attempt to register at the University of Alabama in spite of Governor George Wallace's pledge to prevent the desegregation of the school. Wallace personally blocks the entrance to the registration center, and defies Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's demand that he comply with federal court orders. The students register after National Guard units are sent to the campus.
Medgar Evers, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is shot to death in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home by Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist.
August: The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain sign a nuclear test-ban treaty.
Some 200,000 people, a third of them white, participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They gather at the Lincoln Memorial, where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez appear and Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
September: In Birmingham, a bomb explodes during Sunday services at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black schoolgirls.
November: A group of South Vietnamese military commanders overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, his chief of security, are murdered. There are 16,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam.
President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, and Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president. Lee Harvey Oswald, who has been charged with the murder, is shot and killed in the basement of the Dallas municipal jail by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, on November 24.
1964
January: President Johnson announces a "War on Poverty" in his State of the Union address.
Stanley Kubrick's satirical film about nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is released.
February: The Beatles arrive in New York for their first U.S. tour and make their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, which is watched by more than 73 million viewers.
In Miami, twenty-two-year-old Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing championship. Following his victory, Clay proclaims himself a Black Muslim and takes the name Muhammad Ali.
June: Marshall McLuhan publishes Understanding Media, in which he claims that "the medium is the message."
Herbert Marcuse publishes One-Dimensional Man, a neo-Marxist study of the nature of capitalist societies. He encourages the counter-cultural rebellions of the Sixties, and his books for a time become intellectual bibles for New Left students.
Three civil rights workers-Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney-are murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan during the Freedom Summer voter registration project.
July: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans segregation in all public facilities in the United States. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is established.
The first northern ghetto riot breaks out in Harlem after a fifteen-year-old boy is shot by an off-duty policeman. Riots soon erupt in Rochester, New York; Paterson, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and other cities.
August: Responding to reports of an attack on a U.S. destroyer by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, in international waters, President Johnson orders the first United States air strikes against North Vietnam. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing Johnson to take "necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."
September: The Warren Commission releases its report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and that there was no international or national conspiracy.
October: The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
November: Lyndon Johnson receives 61 percent of the popular vote and defeats Barry Goldwater in the presidential election.
December: Students demonstrate at the University of California at Berkeley, where the dean of students has declared that on-campus political advocacy for off-campus causes is forbidden. Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement, and a veteran of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, encourages the students to hold a sit-in at Sproul Hall protesting the university's "depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy." Police arrest eight hundred nonviolent demonstrators.
There are 23,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam.
1965
February: Malcom X is assassinated while he is giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Three members of the Nation of Islam, the organization he had broken with the previous year, are arrested for the murder.
March: The United States begins sustained bombing of North Vietnam. The first American ground combat units are deployed in South Vietnam.
Martin Luther King, Jr., conducts a voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, that concludes with a four-day march to Montgomery. Outside Montgomery, four Klansmen chase down and kill Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white civil rights worker who was driving in a car with a black passenger.
The Supreme Court rules in favor of conscientious objection, stating unanimously that any person who sincerely believes in a Supreme Being, whether or not the belief conforms to a belief held by accepted religions, can be exempted from military combat training and service.
April: The first national antiwar march takes place in Washington, D.C. It attracts 20,000 demonstrators.
A new military government assumes power in South Vietnam with the appointment of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky.
July: Martin Luther King, Jr., leads some 20,000 marchers to Chicago's City Hall to protest the continued segregation of public schools. It is the largest civil rights demonstration in the city's history.
August: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 goes into effect. It eliminates many of the devices that Southern officials had used to prevent blacks from voting.
Riots involving 30,000 blacks erupt in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles. Twenty thousand National Guardsmen and police are called in. Thirty-five people are killed and four thousand arrests are made over the course of five days.
A federal law goes into effect that makes destroying a draft card a criminal offense.
September: President Johnson signs the Federal Aid to the Arts Act, establishing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
October: Antiwar rallies are held across the country, countered by demonstrations in support of the war. Several antiwar protesters burn their draft cards. In Berkeley, Allen Ginsberg coins the term "flower power."
December: On Christmas Eve, the United States suspends the bombing of North Vietnam. Over 184,000 American military personnel are in South Vietnam.
1966
January: The United States resumes bombing North Vietnam.
In San Francisco, the writer Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters hold the Trips Festival, the first official hippie gathering. Twenty thousand people attend.
February: Muhammad Ali, who has become eligible for the draft, remarks, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."
July: Bob Dylan is injured in a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York. He spends the next year and a half in seclusion, playing country rock music with The Band at home.
August: The comedian Lenny Bruce, whose satirical attacks on bourgeois morality have led to obscenity charges, is found dead of a heroin overdose in his Hollywood, California, home at the age of thirty-nine.
The Beatles give their final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
September: Former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who advocates the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, founds the League for Spiritual Discovery, "a legally incorporated religion dedicated to the ancient sacred sequence of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out."
October: The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, California.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded in Washington, D.C.
December: More than 385,000 American military personnel are in South Vietnam.
1967
January: Lester Maddox, a strict segregationist, is sworn in as governor of Georgia.
The first Human Be-In, presided over by Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, with music by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, takes place in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White II, and Roger Chaffee are killed when a fire breaks out during a test launch of their Apollo spacecraft at Cape Canaveral.
March: United States Senator Robert Kennedy of New York gives a speech calling for a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam and the opening of peace negotiations. U.S. aircraft begin bombing major North Vietnamese industrial sites and electric power plants.
The Quotations of Chairman Mao is published in the West. Within two years, 350 million copies will be sold.
April: Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title by the World Boxing Association after he refuses to be inducted into the Army on the grounds that he is a conscientious objector and a minister of the Nation of Islam. His boxing license is revoked.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that state laws forbidding interracial marriages are unconstitutional.
The Monterey International Pop Festival takes place in California, ushering in the Summer of Love. The Who, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company perform.
June: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is released. It is number one on the charts in the United States for nineteen weeks.
Muhammad Ali is convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison. He appeals.
July: A four-day race riot breaks out in Newark, New Jersey. The National Guard fires on protestors, leaving twenty-six people dead and 1,300 injured. A week later the worst race riot in the history of the United States takes place in Detroit. Federal troops are called out. Two thousand people are reported injured, forty-three are killed, and five thousand arrests are made.
August: George Lincoln Rockwell, the forty-nine-year-old leader of the American Nazi Party, is shot to death in Arlington, Virginia, by a former aide.
September: In the first election since the 1963 coup, Nguyen Van Thieu is elected president of South Vietnam and Nguyen Cao Ky vice-president.
October: Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black justice on the Supreme Court.
Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's chief lieutenant during the Cuban revolution, is killed in Bolivia.
Seven white segregationists are found guilty of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who were murdered during Freedom Summer. The prosecution is led by John Doar of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Over six hundred demonstrators out of a crowd of 50,000 people are arrested during the March on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., to protest the war in Vietnam.
Hair, a "tribal love-rock musical," opens in New York.
November: Rolling Stone magazine is founded in San Francisco.
Senator Eugene McCarthy announces that he will run against President Johnson in the 1968 elections and calls for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam.
December: In New York, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Allen Ginsberg are among some five hundred people arrested for attempting to shut down a draft induction center.
Mike Nichols's film The Graduate is released, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, with a soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel.
Over 485,000 American military personnel are in South Vietnam.
1968
January: Fred Gardner founds the first G.I. Coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina.
The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese launch ground attacks on over one hundred cities and towns throughout South Vietnam during the Tet holiday truce. Several key installations in Saigon are attacked.
March: President Johnson authorizes sending 13,500 more troops to Vietnam. Eugene McCarthy wins 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Robert Kennedy announces that he also will seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Johnson announces a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and declares that he will not seek reelection.
April: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is released.
Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis, Tennessee, motel room by James Earl Ray. Riots in over a hundred towns and cities ensue. Forty-six people are killed and three thousand injured.
President Johnson signs the Housing Rights Act, which makes racial discrimination against those seeking to rent or buy a house illegal.
A student occupation of five Columbia University buildings and a campus-wide strike led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) shuts down the school.
May: The Reverend Ralph Abernathy leads the Poor People's March on Washington against poverty and hunger. Three thousand marchers camp in a makeshift Resurrection City near the Lincoln Memorial.
William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, about a slave revolt in 1831, wins the Pulitzer Prize.
Peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam open in Paris.
In Catonsville, Maryland, nine Roman Catholics, including the priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, raid the Selective Service office and burn hundreds of draft records. They are arrested.
June: On June 3, Andy Warhol is shot by Valerie Solanas, the founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M.).
On June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. He dies on June 6. His assailant, Sirhan Sirhan, is indicted for murder on June 7.
The war in Vietnam is now the longest war in U.S. history.
July: Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, goes on trial for the murder of a policeman in Oakland, California.
August: The Republican National Convention opens in Miami Beach. Richard Nixon receives the nomination for president, with Spiro Agnew as his running mate.
Over ten thousand antiwar demonstrators show up at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but they are outnumbered by law enforcement officers gathered together by Mayor Richard Daley. Twelve thousand city policemen joined by four thousand state policemen and four thousand National Guardsmen clash violently with the demonstrators for days. People are beaten, clubbed, and gassed. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey receives the Democratic nomination. His running mate is Senator Edmund Muskie.
October: President Johnson announces a complete halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.
November: Richard Nixon becomes president by the narrowest electoral margin-less than one percent-since his own defeat by John Kennedy in 1960.
December: The President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence issues the Walker Report, which calls the Chicago police department's actions at the Democratic National Convention an organized "police riot."
Norman Thomas, the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the leader of the U.S. Socialist Party from 1926-1955, dies at the age of eighty-four.
Cèsar Chavez of the United Farm Workers leads a nationwide table grapes boycott. Thousands of college students travel to California to help the farmworkers. Seventeen million Americans stop buying grapes.
Abbie Hoffman publishes Revolution for the Hell of It.
Over 536,000 American military personnel are in South Vietnam.
1969
March: President Nixon orders secret bombing raids on Communist camps in eastern Cambodia.
The Chicago Eight (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale) are charged with conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
April: American troop strength reaches a peak level of 543,000.
May: In Berkeley, California, the "People's Park"-a three-acre vacant lot near the University of California campus that had been claimed by residents of the neighborhood and turned into a garden and community center-is bulldozed by police, who put a fence up around it. When a crowd of students protests, the police turn on them with tear gas and shotguns. At least fifty demonstrators are shot, and one person dies. The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, sends three thousand National Guardsmen in to restore order.
Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, an account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, wins a Pulitzer Prize.
June: Nixon announces the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops from Vietnam.
On the night of Judy Garland's funeral, patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, forcefully resist a police raid. The gay liberation movement is born during the ensuing five days of violence.
July: The Apollo 11 lunar mission, manned by Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, puts the first man on the moon.
The film Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson, opens in New York.
August: Charles Manson and members of his "family" are arrested in Los Angeles for the cult murders of the actress Sharon Tate and six other people.
The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, a rock concert held over three days on a farm near Bethel, New York, is attended by 400,000 people.
September: Ho Chi Minh, who declared the independence of Vietnam in 1945, dies at the age of seventy-nine.
October: The trial of the Chicago Eight is disrupted by demonstrations, including the Weathermen's "Days of Rage" (October 8-11). The National Guard is called in to keep order. On October 29, Judge Julius Hoffman orders Bobby Seale bound and gagged.
A Moratorium against the war in Vietnam is observed by millions of Americans on October 15.
November: Bobby Seale is sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court and his trial for conspiracy is separated from that of the other members of the Chicago Eight.
A second Moratorium against the war culminates with a demonstration (the Mobilization) at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on November 15. Over 250,000 people gather for the largest antiwar protest in American history.
Press reports describe the massacre in March by American soldiers of between two hundred and five hundred unarmed South Vietnamese villagers at My Lai, a rural hamlet.
December: The first draft lottery since 1942 takes place.
Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois branch of the Black Panthers, is shot and killed in a predawn raid by fourteen heavily armed police officers. Mark Clark, another Panther, is also killed. The Illinois ACLU charges that the police action was entirely premeditated and demands an investigation.
Hell's Angels security guards stab a teenage boy to death during a Rolling Stones concert attended by more than 300,000 people at the Altamont Speedway in California.
1970
January: The U.S. Air Force uses B-52 bombers over northern Laos.
Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, holds secret negotiating sessions in Paris with Vietnamese Communists.
February: The Chicago Seven are acquitted of conspiracy charges, although five of the defendants are convicted of incitement to riot.
March: A Greenwich Village town house being used as a bomb factory by the Weathermen explodes, killing three people.
April: Paul McCartney confirms rumors that the Beatles have broken up.
May: Twenty thousand American and South Vietnamese troops cross the Vietnamese border to launch a military invasion of Cambodia, which Nixon publicly downplays as an "incursion." After The New York Times reports that the Nixon administration has been secretly bombing the region since March, 100,000 protestors demonstrate in Washington.
At Kent State University in Ohio, during a rally protesting the invasion of Cambodia, students set fire to the ROTC building and the National Guard shoots at demonstrators, killing four. Four hundred colleges and universities close down for the rest of the spring term as some two million students go on strike.
June: The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Welsch v. United States rules that the claim of conscientious objector status on solely moral grounds is constitutional.
U.S. ground troops are withdrawn from Cambodia.
August: An attempted escape and kidnapping by black militants in a San Rafael, California, courtroom leaves the judge and three kidnappers dead. A warrant is issued for the arrest of former UCLA faculty member and activist Angela Davis on suspicion of helping to organize the escape.
Kate Millett publishes Sexual Politics.
September: A federal court rules that Muhammad Ali cannot be denied a boxing license.
Jimi Hendrix dies of a drug overdose in London at the age of twenty-seven.
October: Janis Joplin dies of a drug overdose in Hollywood, California, at the age of twenty-seven.
Muhammad Ali is licensed to box again.
Angela Davis is arrested in New York City in connection with the courtroom shoot-out and attempted kidnapping in California in August.
1971
February: South Vietnamese troops, aided by U.S. air and artillery, invade Laos. The mission fails within five weeks, incurring heavy casualties.
March: Lt. William Calley is convicted for the 1968 murder of twenty-two civilians at My Lai in South Vietnam and receives a life sentence, of which he will serve three years.
May: Antiwar demonstrations in Washington climax in the Mayday protest, in which 30,000 demonstrators attempt to halt government activities by blocking city traffic.
June: The New York Times publishes the first excerpts of The Pentagon Papers, an exhaustive, top secret government study of America's involvement in Vietnam since World War II that includes evidence of covert operations, coverups, and lies. A former Defense Department official, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, admits leaking the documents to the Times and surrenders to federal authorities in Boston.
Citing financial problems, music promoter Bill Graham shuts down two of rock music's most influential concert halls, the Fillmore East in New York City and the Fillmore West in San Francisco.
The Supreme Court overturns the 1967 conviction of Muhammad Ali for draft evasion.
July: The Doors' lead singer, Jim Morrison, dies of heart failure in Paris at the age of twenty-seven.
1972
March: The North Vietnamese launch a massive invasion of South Vietnam.
May: The United States mines Haiphong harbor in Vietnam and expands the bombing of North Vietnam.
Alabama governor George Wallace, campaigning at a rally for the presidential primary in Laurel, Maryland, is shot by Arthur Bremer. The injury leaves Wallace permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
June: Angela Davis is acquitted of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy for her role in the 1970 courtroom shooting.
The Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C., is broken into. Police apprehend five men with cameras and electronic surveillance equipment. One of them, James McCord, is an ex-CIA agent working for the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-elect the President.
July: South Dakota senator George S. McGovern wins the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach.
November: Richard Nixon is re-elected with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, the greatest Republican landslide in history.
December: In Paris, peace talks break down between the United States and North Vietnam. Nixon orders renewed bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.
1973
January: The Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade upholds a woman's right to have an abortion during the first trimester of a pregnancy.
Former president Lyndon Johnson dies at the age of sixty-four.
Nixon halts the bombing of North Vietnam.
In Paris, a final peace agreement is signed by representatives of the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government. The agreement calls for a cease-fire, the release of prisoners of war, and the holding of elections. Withdrawal of the remaining 23,400 American troops in South Vietnam begins.
October: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam's representative at the Paris peace talks, are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Le Duc Tho declines the award.
Chronology by Jana Martin