1970
First Earth Day
Twenty million Americans turned out in parks and school auditoriums for a day of teach-ins about pollution, wildlife, and the fragility of the planet. Senator Gaylord Nelson had borrowed the idea from the anti-war movement, and the response stunned even the organizers. Within the year Richard Nixon had signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence, and a new era of regulation had begun.
Allende elected in Chile
Salvador Allende, a Marxist physician, won a narrow plurality in the Chilean presidential election, becoming the first Marxist leader elected through democratic means in the Americas. He promised a peaceful road to socialism, nationalized the copper mines, and quickly made enemies in Washington and among Chile's oligarchs. Three years later he would be dead in the presidential palace, and Chile would be under military rule.
Bhola cyclone kills five hundred thousand
A tropical cyclone drove a storm surge up the Bay of Bengal and across the low-lying islands of East Pakistan at night. It was the deadliest storm in modern history, killing around five hundred thousand people. The government in West Pakistan barely responded. The disaster fed the Bengali nationalist fury that would birth Bangladesh.
Black September expels the PLO from Jordan
Yasser Arafat's PLO had become a state within Jordan, running parts of Amman. King Hussein moved against the fedayeen with his Bedouin army in what Palestinians called Black September. Thousands died, and the PLO was driven into Lebanon. A faction took the month for its name and two years later massacred Israeli athletes in Munich.
Mishima commits ritual suicide
Japan's most famous living novelist and his followers seized a military headquarters in Tokyo, tried to rouse the garrison to restore imperial rule, were mocked by the soldiers, and then Yukio Mishima knelt and disemboweled himself with a short sword. He was forty-five. The incident stunned postwar Japan, which had thought itself past such things.
Kent State killings
At a Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. A Pulitzer-winning photograph showed a young woman screaming over a fallen classmate. Campuses across America shut down in protest. Nixon's war had come home to the lawn of a midwestern campus.
Kent State shootings
Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on student antiwar protesters at Kent State University, killing four. A photograph of a young woman screaming over a fallen body carried the event into every American paper. Campuses across the country shut down in grief and fury. Nixon's Vietnamization program had domestic blood on it now.