As the Vietnam War expanded into Cambodia, anti-war rallies flared at home; at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen killed four unarmed student protesters, shocking the nation. Americans held their breath as NASA scrambled to bring Apollo 13 astronauts home safely after their aborted moon mission. Some 20 million people celebrated the first Earth Day, rock icons Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix both died of drug overdoses at age 27, and the Beatles called it quits.
Jan
05
The bodies of dissident union leader Joseph "Jock" Yablonski, his wife, and daughter are discovered in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania, farmhouse by Yablonski’s son Kenneth. The family had been dead for nearly a week, killed on New Year’s Eve by [killers hired by the United Mine Workers (UMW) union leadership](http://killers hired by the United Mine Workers). Yablonski’s murder eventually brought down the whole union leadership and ended the widespread corruption of the union under UMW President Tony Boyle.
Jan
14
They were the most successful American pop group of the 1960s—a group whose 12 #1 hits in the first full decade of the rock and roll era places them behind only Elvis and the Beatles in terms of chart dominance. They helped define the very sound of the 60s, but like fellow icons the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, they came apart in the first year of the 70s. The curtain closed for good on Diana Ross and the Supremes on January 14, 1970, at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Jan
16
Jan
26
U.S. Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez Jr. spends his 2,000th day in captivity in Southeast Asia. First taken prisoner when his plane was shot down on August 5, 1964, he became one of the longest-held POWs in U.S. history. Alvarez was downed over Hon Gai during the first bombing raids against North Vietnam in retaliation for the disputed attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
Jan
27
“I wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch and we’re putting it out for dinner.” That’s the way John Lennon told the story of “Instant Karma,” one of his most memorable songs as a solo artist and the third Lennon single to appear before the official breakup of the Beatles. The only exaggeration in John’s description was the part about dinner: “Instant Karma” wasn’t actually released to the public until 13 days after it was written and recorded over the course of a single Tuesday, on January 27, 1970. By any measure, it was one of the fastest pop songs ever to come to market.
Feb
10
Feb
11
From the Kagoshima Space Center on the east coast of Japan’s Ohsumi Peninsula, Ohsumi, Japan’s first satellite, is successfully launched into an orbit around Earth. The achievement made Japan the world’s fourth space power, after the Soviet Union in 1957, the United States in 1958, and France in 1965.
Feb
12
Feb
19
Feb
21
Mar
09
The U.S. Marines turn over control of the five northernmost provinces in South Vietnam to the U.S. Army. The Marines had been responsible for this area since they first arrived in South Vietnam in 1965. The change in responsibility for this area was part of President Richard Nixon’s initiative to reduce U.S. troop levels as the South Vietnamese accepted more responsibility for the fighting. After the departure of the 3rd Marine Division from Vietnam in late 1969, the 1st Marine Division was the only marine division left operating in South Vietnam.
Mar
10
The U.S. Army accuses Capt. Ernest Medina and four other soldiers of committing crimes at My Lai (also known as Songmy) in March 1968. The charges ranged from premeditated murder to rape and the “maiming” of a suspect under interrogation. Medina was the company commander of Lt. William Calley and other soldiers charged with murder and numerous crimes at My Lai 4 in Song My village.
Mar
16
On March 16, 1970, Motown star Tammi Terrell died of complications from the malignant brain tumor that caused her 1967 collapse.
NEW YORK - CIRCA 1966: Motown recording star Tammi Terrell poses for a portrait circa1966 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Mar
19
The National Assembly grants “full power” to Premier Lon Nol, declares a state of emergency, and suspends four articles of the constitution, permitting arbitrary arrest and banning public assembly. Lon Nol and First Deputy Premier Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak had conducted a bloodless coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouk the day before and proclaimed the establishment of the Khmer Republic.
Apr
01
On April 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signs legislation officially banning cigarette ads on television and radio. Nixon, who enjoyed the occasional cigar, supported the legislation at the increasing insistence of public health advocates.
Apr
06
On April 6, 1970, Sam Sheppard, a doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife in a trial that caused a media frenzy in the 1950s, dies of liver failure. After a decade in prison, Sheppard was released following a re-trial. His story is rumored to have loosely inspired the television series and movie The Fugitive.
Apr
07
Apr
10
Apr
11
On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13, the third lunar landing mission, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert and Fred W. Haise. The spacecraft’s destination was the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, where the astronauts were to explore the Imbrium Basin and conduct geological experiments. After an oxygen tank exploded on the evening of April 13, however, the new mission objective became to get the Apollo 13 crew home alive.
T_he Apollo 13 lunar landing mission prime crew from left to right are: Commander, James A. Lovell, Jr., Command Module pilot, John L. Swigert Jr. and Lunar Module pilot, Fred W. Haise, Jr._
NASA
Apr
13
On April 13, 1970, disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days before for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon but were forced to turn their attention to simply making it home alive.
Apr
17
With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth on April 17, 1970.
Flight controllers man the control room of the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston as the Apollo 13 reenters earth's atmosphere for splashdown and recovery. (Photo by F. Carter Smith/Sygma via Getty Images)
Sygma via Getty Images
Apr
22
Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems, is celebrated in the United States for the first time on April 22, 1970. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of colleges and universities, participated in rallies, marches and educational programs across the country.
Lambert / Getty Images
Apr
28
May
04
On May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fire their weapons at a group of anti-war demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students and wounding nine. The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by the conflict in Vietnam, and further galvanized the anti-war movement.
Following the May 4, 1970 shooting of students at Kent State University students at UNM took over the student union building. After several days of the occupation the National Guard were called upon to clear the students from the building. (Photo by Steven Clevenger/Corbis via Getty Images)
Corbis via Getty Images
May
08
President Nixon, at a news conference, defends the U.S. troop movement into Cambodia, saying the operation would provide six to eight months of time for training South Vietnamese forces and thus would shorten the war for Americans. Nixon reaffirmed his promise to withdraw 150,000 American soldiers by the following spring.
May
09
In the early hours of May 9, 1970, a frazzled President Richard Nixon embarks upon what his chief of staff will describe as "the weirdest day so far" of his presidency. Preoccupied with the recent Kent State shootings and the unrest that has spread to college campuses across the country, Nixon makes an impromptu and bizarre visit to a group of anti-war protesters at the Lincoln Memorial.
May
10
On May 10, 1970, 40 seconds into overtime of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final, Boston Bruins star Bobby Orr slips the winning goal past St. Louis Blues goaltender Glenn Hall. After scoring, Orr leaps into the air before landing flat and sliding into his teammates’ embrace. The famous celebration is immortalized by Boston Record-American photographer Ray Lussier, whose image of the soaring Orr is one of the most famous sports photographs of all time.
May
17
On May 17, 1970, Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II, a papyrus sailing craft modeled after ancient Egyptian sailing vessels. Heyerdahl was attempting to prove his theory that Mediterranean civilizations sailed to America in ancient times and exchanged cultures with the people of Central and South America. The Ra II crossed the 4,000 miles of ocean to Barbados in 57 days.
Jun
02
Jun
24
On an amendment offered by Senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) to the Foreign Military Sales Act, the Senate votes 81 to 10 to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. In August 1964, after North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers (in what became known as the Tonkin Gulf incident), President Johnson asked Congress for a resolution authorizing the president “to take all necessary measures” to defend Southeast Asia.
Jul
14
Early on the morning of July 14, 1970, the Young Lords, a predominantly Puerto Rican group of community activists in New York City, storm Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and barricade themselves inside. The Young Lords claimed the hospital as their own, placing a Puerto Rican flag on the roof and flying signs from its windows reading “Welcome to the people’s hospital” and “Bienvenidos al hospital del pueblo.” It was the beginning of what became a 12-hour-long occupation in protest of the hospital’s poor care conditions.
Jul
21
After 11 years of construction, the Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in Egypt is completed on July 21, 1970. More than two miles long at its crest, the massive $1 billion dam ended the cycle of flood and drought in the Nile River region, and exploited a tremendous source of renewable energy, but had a controversial environmental impact.
Adrian Wojcik/Getty Images
Aug
23
Aug
29
Around dusk on the evening on August 29, 1970, a group of 23 Native American activists climbs to the top of Mount Rushmore. Renaming the landmark Crazy Horse Mountain, in honor of the Lakota Sioux leader who famously resisted white Americans’ incursions into the area, the protesters are there to reclaim land they believe to be rightfully theirs under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed Indigenous people the right to all of Western South Dakota. The occupation will last for two months, beginning a new chapter in Native American activism.
Aug
29
On August 29, 1970, more than 20,000 Mexican Americans march through East Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. The Chicano Moratorium, as this massive protest was known, was peaceful until the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department entered Laguna Park, sparking violence and rioting that led to three deaths. The Chicano Moratorium is now remembered both as the tragic end of one stage of Chicano activism and as a moment that galvanized and inspired a new generation of activists.
Sep
05
On September 5, the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), in coordination with the South Vietnamese (ARVN) 1st Infantry Division, initiates Operation Jefferson Glen in Thua Thien Province west of Hue. This operation lasted until October 1971, and was one of the last major large-scale military operations in which U.S. ground forces would take part.
Sep
25
On September 25, 1970, in the 8:30 p.m. time slot immediately following "The Brady Bunch," ABC premiered a program that would give television production company Screen Gems its second TV-to-pop-chart smash: "The Partridge Family." Unwilling to rest as a one-hit wonder when its first big hit, "The Monkees," went off the air in 1968, Screen Gems was wasting no time in trying to repeat its success.
GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images
Oct
04
Oct
08
Oct
08
On October 8, 1970, one of Russia's best-known contemporary writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. A leading writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression, he was awarded the prize, the Nobel committee wrote, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Oct
16
On October 16, 1970, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice release a double-LP “concept” album called Jesus Christ Superstar, which only later would become the smash-hit Broadway musical of the same name. The duo would go on to become the most successful composer-lyricist team in modern theater history.
Nov
09
The Supreme Court refuses to hear a challenge by the state of Massachusetts regarding the constitutionality of the Vietnam War. By a 6-3 vote, the justices rejected the effort of the state to bring a suit in federal court in defense of Massachusetts residents claiming protection under a state law that allowed them to refuse military service in an undeclared war.
Nov
14
On November 14, 1970, a chartered jet carrying most of the Marshall University football team clips a stand of trees and crashes into a hillside just two miles from the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia, killing everyone onboard.The team was returning from that day’s game, a 17-14 loss to East Carolina University. Thirty-seven Marshall football players were aboard the plane, along with the team’s coach, its doctors, the university athletic director and 25 team boosters–some of Huntington, West Virginia’s most prominent citizens–who had traveled to North Carolina to cheer on the Thundering Herd. “The whole fabric,” a citizen of Huntington wrote later, “the whole heart of the town was aboard.”
Nov
17
The court-martial of 2nd Lt. William Calley begins. Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade (Light) of the 23rd (Americal) Division, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968. My Lai 4 was one of a cluster of hamlets that made up Son My village in the northern area of South Vietnam.
Nov
25
Dec
02
On December 2, 1970, a new federal agency opens its doors. Created in response to the dawning realization that human activity can have major effects on the planet, the Environmental Protection Agency heralded a new age of government action on behalf of the environment.
Dec
12
After more than a decade of hits like that never quite made it to the top of the charts, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles finally earn their first #1 hit when “Tears Of A Clown” topped the Billboard Hot 100 on December 12, 1970.
Dec
21
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