1974
Nixon resigns
Facing impeachment over Watergate, Richard Nixon appeared on national television to announce that he would resign the presidency the next day at noon. He boarded Marine One on the South Lawn, flashed his awkward double-victory sign, and flew home to California. A constitutional crisis had been resolved without violence, barely.
Lucy discovered in Ethiopia
In the Afar triangle, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson found a forty percent complete skeleton of an early hominid 3.2 million years old. He named her Lucy after the Beatles song playing at camp. The fossil showed that upright walking had come before big brains. Human origins had grown a new branch.
Carnation Revolution in Portugal
Army officers tired of fighting colonial wars in Africa staged a coup in Lisbon that toppled the forty-year Estado Novo dictatorship. Crowds put carnations in the barrels of soldiers' rifles. Within months Portugal was negotiating independence for its African colonies and rebuilding as a democracy. Europe's last fascist regime in the west was gone.
Turkey invades Cyprus
Responding to a Greek-backed coup on the island that aimed at unification with Athens, Turkey sent troops into northern Cyprus and established a de facto partition that still holds half a century later. A third of Greek Cypriots were displaced from their homes. UN peacekeepers moved into the buffer zone and are still there. The Mediterranean had acquired a new frozen conflict.
Haile Selassie deposed
After eight hundred years of Ethiopian monarchy, a Marxist military committee called the Derg deposed the eighty-two-year-old emperor Haile Selassie. He was kept under house arrest in his palace until, it was reported, he died of prostate failure a year later. Many believed he was smothered on Derg orders. The Lion of Judah was no more.
Hank Aaron breaks the home run record
On an April night in Atlanta, Hank Aaron hit his seven hundred fifteenth career home run off Al Downing, breaking Babe Ruth's longstanding record amid a torrent of racist hate mail and death threats. Two white fans ran onto the field to pound him on the back as he rounded second. He tipped his helmet and kept going.