Do You Know These Famous Events of the 1960s?

Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world’s first woman prime minister when her party was elected to lead Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960. Indira Gandhi — the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru — succeeded her father in 1964. Golda Meir was elected prime minister of Israel in 1969. Mexico, however, has had no women leaders to date.

Tet is Vietnam's most important holiday, a celebration of the Lunar New Year. Previously, it had been the occasion for a ceasefire between North Vietnam and the U.S.-backed South Vietnam. But on January 31, 1968, North Vietnam launched a series of heavy attacks now known as the Tet Offensive. The effect was felt in the United States, where victory looked increasingly unlikely, and opposition to the war began to grow.

By the time they shot to fame in the U.K. in 1963, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr had already been performing as the Beatles since 1961. By 1964, “Beatlemania” had reached the U.S. The track “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was No. 1 on the charts on February 9, 1964, when the band made its historic U.S. TV debut to a crowd of screaming fans and 73 million viewers.

On February 14, 1962, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood a televised tour of the White House. The first public peek into the presidential home was a huge success, drawing around 80 million viewers. Highlighting a $2 million restoration project, the First Lady drew attention to the building’s rich history, noting how its preservation was not always taken seriously in the past.

At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos received the gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter race. As the national anthem played, they raised their right fists in the air in the salute of the Black Power movement. Both athletes were part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which aimed to use the event’s publicity to expose racial injustice.

In 1967, up to 100,000 people congregated in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and stayed there throughout the summer, in a movement that became known as the Summer of Love. The crowd demonstrated for peace, free love, and free speech against a background of psychedelic drugs and music. The neighborhood became the epicenter of the hippie movement, and the Summer of Love brought national media attention to the growing counterculture.

“Rolling Stone” was founded by former Berkeley student Jann Wenner and newspaper jazz critic Ralph Gleason. The name came from a Muddy Waters song lyric, "a rolling stone gathers no moss." The publication both reflected and legitimized the culture and music of the era’s young generation, using both standard English and youth slang. By the 1990s it reached a circulation of 1.25 million.

In 1963, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph joined forces, combining the demonstrations that Randolph had planned for jobs and King had planned for freedom into the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 in a demonstration that included King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Star Trek” premiered on NBC in 1966, starring William Shatner. It ran for three seasons but inspired many, many more series and movies. “Doctor Who” first materialized on the BBC in 1963, starring William Hartnell, and is still running today after a 1989 to 2005 hiatus and many cast changes. “Lost in Space” originally aired from 1965 to 1968 on CBS. The first “Star Wars” film, however, wasn’t made until 1977.

Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party starting in 1935 and founded Maoism, a form of communism that focused on non-industrialized peasantry. After a long struggle, the party gained control of the country, and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Mao led China’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 until his death in 1976.

The metric system originated in France in 1795, shortly after the French Revolution opened the door to sweeping societal changes. Unlike previous systems, it was uniformly based on multiples of 10, which simplified calculations. Scientific fields in Britain had already been using the metric system for years by 1965, when industry demands to replace the U.K.’s own imperial system were finally met.

A trained lawyer, Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to ending apartheid, the system of institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa. He was imprisoned in 1962 after calling for a national strike, and remained there until his release in 1990. In 1994, Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa, shortly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize along with his predecessor, F. W. de Klerk.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is told through the eyes of Scout, a young girl whose father, Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, defends an innocent man against a racist charge. Harpur Lee’s real father had defended a similar case, and she herself studied law at the University of Alabama before becoming a writer. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2007 Lee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Young pilot Yuri Gagarin was chosen by the USSR government to be the first human in space for his skill and charismatic personality. On April 12, 1961, he lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, after memorably shouting “Poekhali!” or “Let’s go!” He remained in orbit for 108 minutes, reached a height of 203 miles, and became a global celebrity.

In 1962, the USSR began missile shipments to Cuba, which had a socialist government under Fidel Castro. On October 22, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced a naval blockade, beginning a 13-day standoff during which many feared nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the U.S. accepted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s offer to remove the missiles if the U.S. would not invade Cuba, and would secretly remove its missiles from Turkey.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was not actually held in Woodstock, but in the nearby town of Bethel, New York. From August 15 to August 18, 1969, some 400,000 people descended on the small rural town to hear Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and other now-legendary musicians. The site of the festival now hosts the Bethel Woods Museum and Center for the Arts.

After World War II, Germany was divided into the capitalist West and socialist East, and each controlled half of the capital city, Berlin. The night after a 1961 decree by the East German government, workers began construction on the 28-mile wall, or “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” shocking unsuspecting Berliners. Crossing the divide was almost impossible for locals until the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989.

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University in Houston, Texas — the home of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center — and declared that before the end of the decade, the United States would land astronauts on the moon. The U.S. spent $25 billion on the space program, and on July 20, 1969, Kennedy’s vow was realized when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.