1971
Bangladesh Liberation War
After West Pakistan's military refused to accept an election won by East Pakistan's Awami League, the army launched a brutal crackdown on Bengali civilians and intellectuals. Up to three million Bengalis were killed, hundreds of thousands of women raped, ten million refugees driven into India. Indian intervention in December ended the war in two weeks and created Bangladesh.
Intel releases first microprocessor
Intel's 4004, a chip smaller than a fingernail containing twenty-three hundred transistors, could execute sixty thousand instructions a second. It had been designed to run a Japanese calculator, a humble birth for a revolutionary technology. Within a decade microprocessors would power personal computers, and within two decades, almost everything else. The digital age had its engine.
PRC takes China's UN seat
The General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China on Taiwan and give its UN seat, including a Security Council veto, to the People's Republic. After twenty-two years of exclusion, Beijing was suddenly a power in every global institution. Taiwan would spend the next half century fighting for international recognition, often losing.
Nixon ends gold standard
In a Sunday evening television address, Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold on demand. The postwar Bretton Woods system was over. Currencies began to float against each other, and the modern era of global finance, with its booms, panics, and trillion-dollar flows, began.
Intel 4004 microprocessor released
Intel announced the 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor, a chip the size of a fingernail containing the core of a computer. It had been designed to run a Japanese calculator. Its descendants would power personal computers, phones, cars, and almost everything else in the coming digital age. The chip era had begun.
Greenpeace founded
A small group of Canadian activists set sail from Vancouver to protest American nuclear testing in Alaska's Aleutian islands. They called themselves Greenpeace. Their boat was turned back, but the media attention was enormous. Within a few years Greenpeace would be a major international environmental organization, pioneering the use of media spectacle for activism.