1967
Six-Day War
In a preemptive strike, Israeli jets destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Within six days Israel had taken the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, tripling its territory. Arab armies fled or died in the sand. The geography of the modern Middle East was set, and the occupation began.
Sgt. Pepper released
The Beatles released an album that was less a collection of singles than a concept, a record you played whole from a sunlit sleeve full of cardboard cut-outs. It was pop music reaching for high art. Within weeks it was playing in every dormitory and commune on both sides of the Atlantic. The Summer of Love had its soundtrack.
Biafran War begins
The Igbo-majority southeast of Nigeria declared itself the Republic of Biafra, and Nigeria sent troops to crush the secession. The resulting blockade starved perhaps a million Biafran children to death over three years. Television pictures of distended bellies reached Western living rooms and helped birth the modern humanitarian movement and the concept of intervention to prevent famine.
Che Guevara killed in Bolivia
After leaving Cuba to foment revolution elsewhere, Ernesto Che Guevara was tracked down in a Bolivian valley by CIA-trained rangers, captured, and shot the next day in a rural schoolhouse. He was thirty-nine. Before he died he stared at his executioner and said, Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man. His face became a T-shirt.
Detroit rebellion
A police raid on an unlicensed bar in a Black Detroit neighborhood set off five days of rioting, arson, and looting. Forty-three died; federal troops were deployed. Two thousand buildings burned. It was the worst urban uprising of the 1960s and accelerated white flight from Detroit. The city never fully recovered.
First heart transplant
In a Cape Town hospital, Christiaan Barnard transferred the heart of a young car-accident victim into the chest of a fifty-three-year-old grocer. The patient lived eighteen days before pneumonia killed him. A symbolic barrier had been crossed. Within a decade heart transplants would become, if not routine, at least possible in most major hospitals.