THE SIXTIES
A Chronology of Events
Editor: Piero Scaruffi
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1960:
- Almost all of African gains independence in the 1960's
- Famine caused by the failure of Mao's "collectivization" program kills 20 million Chinese
- Sharpeville massacre in South Africa
- Gregory Pincus invents the birth control pill
- The bathyscaphe Trieste descends to the deepest spot in the oceans
- First laser (Theodore Maiman)
1961:
- Soviet troops build a wall to isolate West Berlin and discourage people from fleeing Eastern Germany
- Yuri Gagarin becomes the first astronaut
- First stereo radio broadcasting
1962:
- American intervention in Vietnam to counter Soviet help to the Vietcong
- First telecommunication satellite, the Telstar
1963
- Assassination of John Kennedy
- US-backed South Vietnam persecutes buddhist monks
- Greatest train robbery of all time on the Glasgow-London train
- Valium is introduced
- the Organization of African Unity (OAU) is created
1964:
- Cable TV is deployed in U.S. cities
- Student protests in Berkeley spread around the States, free-speech movement
- Breznev head of the Soviet Union
- Smoking is proved to be dangerous
- First commercial mainframe computer by IBM
- The CIA fabricates the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for direct US intervention in Vietnam
1965:
- War between India and Pakistan
- Gordon Moore's law: processing power of computers will double every 18 months
- Ferdinand Marcos becomes dictator of the Philippines
1966:
- Cultural Revolution in China: directed by Mao, millions of students enroll as "Red Guards" attack party authorities and teachers, and their fanaticism
brings anarchy and destruction
1967:
- First heart transplant (in South Africa, by dr. Christian Barnard)
- Cassius Clay imprisoned for refusing to serve in Vietnam
- Summer of Love in San Francisco
1968:
- Martin Luther King assassinated
- Tommie Smith protests the American anthem at the Olympic games
- Breznev states his doctrine of limited sovereignity
- Czech revolution: spring of Prague (Dubcek)
- American soldiers massacre more than 500 civilians at My Lai
- Student riots in Western Europe (led by Cohen Bendit in France, Dutschke in Germany, Toni Negri in Italy)
- 520,000 US troops in Vietnam - The US uses chemical weapons - Between 1965 and 1968 the US dropped 7 million tons of bombs, twice World War II - 130,000 civilian casualties a month
- My Lai massacre by US marines led by William Calley
- Vietnam is the first televised war although what the world sees is only the US propaganda
1969:
- The IRA starts a campaign of terrorism in Northern Ireland that will kill
more than 2.000 people
- Qaddafi dictator of Lybia
- First commercial VCR (Sony)
- The Unix operating system is born
- The computer network ArpaNET is born in the U.S. (it will be renamed Internet in 1985)
- Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the Moon
- US president Richard Nixon approves carpet bombing and land invasion of Cambodia
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