1962
Cuban Missile Crisis
U-2 photographs showed Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles being assembled in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. For thirteen days the world held its breath while Kennedy's ExComm debated strike versus blockade. Khrushchev blinked; missiles were traded quietly for American ones in Turkey, and both leaders stepped back from the precipice. The closest the century came to nuclear war had come and gone.
Algeria wins independence
After eight years of atrocity on both sides, General de Gaulle signed an agreement at Evian and Algeria became independent. A million European settlers fled to France in a few months. A new nation faced the wreckage of war and the unsolved question of what to do with its wartime heroes, who would rule for decades.
Vatican II opens
Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council in Rome, summoning twenty-five hundred bishops from around the world. Over four years they remade Catholic liturgy, swept away Latin in favor of vernacular, and opened the church to dialogue with other religions and the modern world. Catholicism changed more in four years than in four hundred.
Silent Spring published
Rachel Carson's quiet book about pesticides and dying songbirds laid out a meticulous scientific case against DDT and the assumption that nature could absorb anything human beings dumped into it. Chemical companies tried to discredit her; a dying Carson, battling cancer, testified to Congress with calm precision. The modern environmental movement began with her sentences.
First Beatles single
A small Liverpool band released its first single, Love Me Do, on the Parlophone label. It crept up to number seventeen on the British charts. Within eighteen months they would be the biggest act in pop music history, and within three years they would be changing what pop music could do. Rock had found its transformative band.
Andy Warhol shows Campbell's Soup Cans
At a Los Angeles gallery, a former advertising illustrator displayed thirty-two hand-painted canvases of Campbell's Soup cans, one for each flavor. The gallery priced them at a hundred dollars each and sold a few. Pop Art had arrived, and the commercial image and the gallery image were no longer distinguishable.