1960
Great Chilean Earthquake
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded - magnitude 9.5 - struck southern Chile, triggering tsunamis that crossed the Pacific and killed people in Hawaii and Japan fifteen hours later. Two million Chileans were left homeless. The earth rang like a bell for days. Seismology had found its upper limit, and it was terrifying.
Year of Africa
Seventeen African nations declared independence in a single year - from Senegal to Madagascar, from the Congo to Somalia. Colonial flags came down in ceremonies that mixed euphoria with apprehension. The speed was dizzying: empires that had taken decades to build dissolved in months. Africa's political map was redrawn between January and December.
The Pill approved
The FDA approved Enovid for contraceptive use, making it the first oral contraceptive available by prescription in the United States. Within a decade tens of millions of American women were taking it, and a century-old pattern of reproductive life had been broken. Work, marriage, sex, and family reorganized themselves around the new chemistry. Few twentieth-century technologies changed daily life more completely.
U-2 shot down over USSR
A CIA spy plane on a photoreconnaissance run at seventy thousand feet was hit by a Soviet missile near Sverdlovsk, deep inside Russian territory. Washington claimed it was a weather plane that had strayed off course. Khrushchev produced the wreckage and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, alive. A Paris summit collapsed. The Cold War briefly looked hot.
Sharpeville massacre
South African police opened fire on a crowd of Black anti-pass-law demonstrators in a township south of Johannesburg, many of whom had deliberately left their pass books at home as an act of defiance. Sixty-nine died, most shot in the back as they ran. The incident shocked the world and turned the ANC toward armed struggle. Nelson Mandela, still free, began organizing a sabotage wing.
Congo Crisis
Days after winning independence from Belgium, the Republic of the Congo slid into chaos. Its mineral-rich Katanga province seceded. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, a fiery nationalist, appealed to the UN, then the Soviets. Within six months he had been kidnapped and murdered with Belgian and CIA help. The Cold War came to Africa.
Kennedy elected
In the closest presidential election in living memory, a forty-three-year-old senator from Massachusetts edged out Richard Nixon with help from Mayor Daley's Chicago. Kennedy would be the youngest elected president, the first Catholic, and the first of a televised generation. His inaugural promise to pay any price electrified a rising generation.