Region
Few voters were registered, but the campaign exposed violent repression in Mississippi, created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and built pressure for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
An estimated 73 million viewers watched, a record for American television at the time, and the broadcast launched Beatlemania and the British Invasion in the United States.
The act outlawed segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment and federally funded programmes, ending legal Jim Crow in public life.
The detection of the cosmic microwave background gave strong evidence for the Big Bang theory and earned Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
About 130 deaths, most of them caused by tsunamis; the earthquake became a key case in confirming plate tectonics and improving tsunami warnings.
After five years of strikes and a national consumer boycott, California table grape growers signed the first major union contracts with farm workers in July 1970.
Six days of rioting left 34 people dead and about 1,000 injured; the McCone Commission blamed unemployment, poor schools and police relations but was criticised for understating grievances.
Congress outlawed racial discrimination in voting and imposed federal oversight on states with a history of it, leading to a dramatic rise in Black voter registration in the South.
Malcolm X was killed by members of the Nation of Islam; two of the three men convicted were exonerated in 2021 after evidence was found to have been withheld.
After police violence on Bloody Sunday shocked the nation, a protected march reached Montgomery and built decisive support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mariner 4 returned the first close-up images of another planet, revealing a cratered Mars with a very thin atmosphere and ending hopes of canals or abundant life.
Gemini 6A achieved the first rendezvous between two crewed spacecraft, proving a technique essential for the Apollo Moon landings.
