On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese troops seize the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, toppling the brutal regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

On January 9, 1979, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, a.k.a. UNICEF, stages a concert fundraiser featuring dozens of leading lights of late-'70s pop music. Designed to publicize the organization's proclamation of 1979 as the “International Year of the Child” the event called attention to the poverty, malnutrition and lack of access to quality education affecting millions of children throughout the developing world. Staged in the U.N. General Assembly Hall in New York City, the show was subsequently broadcast around the world as “The Music for UNICEF Concert: A Gift of Song.”

Faced with an army mutiny and violent demonstrations against his rule, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the leader of Iran since 1941, is forced to flee the country. Fourteen days later, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the Islamic revolution, returned after 15 years of exile and took control of Iran.

On January 26, 1979, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a television comedy about two cousins in the rural South and their souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee, debuts on CBS. The show, which originally aired for seven seasons, centered around cousins Bo Duke (John Schneider) and Luke Duke (Tom Wopat) and their ongoing efforts to elude their nemeses, the crooked county commissioner “Boss” Jefferson Davis Hogg (Sorrell Booke) and the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (James Best).

Brenda Spencer kills two men and wounds nine children as they enter the Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Spencer blazed away with rifle shots from her home directly across the street from the school. After 20 minutes of shooting, police surrounded Spencer’s home for six hours before she surrendered. Asked for some explanation for the attack, Spencer allegedly said, “I just don’t like Mondays. I did this because it’s a way to cheer up the day. Nobody likes Mondays.”

On January 29, 1979, Deng Xiaoping, deputy premier of China, meets President Jimmy Carter, and together they sign historic new accords that reverse decades of U.S. opposition to the People’s Republic of China.

On February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran in triumph after 15 years of exile. The shah and his family had fled the country two weeks before, and jubilant Iranian revolutionaries were eager to establish a fundamentalist Islamic government under Khomeini’s leadership.

On February 2, 1979, Sid Vicious, former bassist for the notorious Sex Pistols—and the living embodiment of everything punk rock stood for and against—dies of a heroin overdose in a Greenwich Village apartment. His death likely came as a surprise to very few.

Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments at the Auschwitz death camps, dies of a stroke while swimming in Brazil—although his death was not verified until 1985.

In response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, China launches an invasion of Vietnam.

On March 9, 1979, the 26 Major League Baseball teams are ordered by MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn to allow equal access to all reporters, regardless of sex. The commissioner’s order comes after Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke’s successful lawsuit against MLB for refusing her access to clubhouses at Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.

On March 14, 1979, Judy Chicago’s art installation "The Dinner Party" opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The piece remains one of the most famous—and controversial—works of feminist art.

In a ceremony at the White House, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign a historic peace agreement, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties.

On March 27, 1979, one of pop music's most famous love triangles shifts when British Blues guitarist Eric Clapton finally marries his muse, former model Pattie Boyd. He had been pursuing her since she was married to one of his best friends, Beatle George Harrison.

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, one of the worst accidents in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.

The world’s first anthrax outbreak begins in Sverdlovsk, Russia (now Ekaterinburg), on April 2, 1979. By the time it ends six weeks later, according to official records, 66 people had died and some 30 more had survived serious illness. Ekaterinburg, as the town was known in Soviet times, also suffered livestock losses from the epidemic.

On April 7, 1979, nearly a year after his brother Bob pitched a no-hitter, Houston Astros pitcher Ken Forsch tosses his first career no-hitter. Ken and Bob become the first—and only—brothers to pitch official no-hitters in Major League Baseball history.

On April 11, 1979, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin flees the Ugandan capital of Kampala as Tanzanian troops and forces of the Uganda National Liberation Front close in. Two days later, Kampala fell and a coalition government of former exiles took power.

Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, becomes Britain’s first female prime minister on May 4, 1979. The Oxford-educated chemist and lawyer took office the day after the Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in general parliamentary elections.

The music industry is notorious for its creative accounting practices and for onerous contracts that can keep even some top-selling artists perpetually in debt to their record labels. In a typical recording contract, a record label advances an artist a certain sum of money against future earnings from royalties. But because the cost of things like studio time, marketing support and tour expenses must be “recouped” by the label before an artist earns any royalties, many artists who sign recording contracts never sell enough records to “earn out” their advance. Where this system truly breaks down is when a top-selling artist or group like TLC or Run-DMC finds itself deeply in debt to its record label despite having sold millions of records. Those are but two groups that have pursued a strategy made famous by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Tom Petty when he declared bankruptcy on May 23, 1979 in an effort to free himself from his contract with Shelter Records.

Almost 300 people are killed on May 25, 1979 when an American Airlines flight crashes and explodes after losing one engine just after takeoff.

On the morning of May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz walked the two blocks from his home to his bus stop in Manhattan. It was his first time walking there alone before school, and the last day his parents would ever see him. That’s because someone abducted Etan during that walk. In his parents’ effort to find him, Etan became among the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons.

A celebration that has persisted for over a century receives its first official recognition on June 7, 1979, as the Texas Legislature passes a bill declaring Juneteenth a state holiday. The annual June 19 celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation—not the announcement itself, but the arrival of the news of the proclamation in Texas—is now officially observed in almost all 50 states.

On June 11, 1979, John Wayne, an iconic American film actor famous for starring in countless westerns, dies at age 72 after battling cancer for more than a decade.

During a summit meeting in Vienna, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT-II agreement dealing with limitations and guidelines for nuclear weapons. The treaty, which never formally went into effect, proved to be one of the most controversial U.S.-Soviet agreements of the Cold War.

On July 1, 1979, the first personal stereo cassette player, called the Sony Walkman, debuts for sale. It would spark a revolution in portable electronics.

On July 11, 1979, parts of Skylab, America’s first space station, come crashing down on Australia and into the Indian Ocean five years after the last manned Skylab mission ended. No one was injured.

As the 1970s came to an end, the age of disco was also nearing its finale. But the public backlash to the genre reached its peak on July 12, 1979 with the infamous “Disco Demolition” night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. That incident, which led to at least nine injuries, 39 arrests and the cancellation and forfeit of a Major League Baseball game, is widely credited with signaling the end of disco's reign.

On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter addresses the nation via live television to discuss the nation’s energy crisis and accompanying recession.

Jeffrey MacDonald stands trial in North Carolina for the murder of his wife and children nearly 10 years before. Captain MacDonald, an army doctor stationed at Fort Bragg, made an emergency call to military police in the early morning hours of February 17, 1970. Responding officers found Colette MacDonald and her two children, five-year-old Kimberley and two-year-old Kristen, dead from multiple stab wounds. The word “pig” had been written in blood on the headboard of a bed. Jeffrey, who had a few stab wounds himself, told the officers that four hippies had attacked the family.

Apocalypse Now, the acclaimed Vietnam War film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, opens in theaters around the United States on August 15, 1979.

On August 25, 1979, the storm that will become Hurricane David forms near Cape Verde off the African coast in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It would go on to devastate the island of Dominica, and then the Dominican Republic, [killing at least 2,000 people](http://Its winds increased further as it moved west-northwestward toward the island of Hispañola and had peak sustained winds at 175 mph (280 km/hr) just prior to its landfall at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The winds and heavy rain caused 2000 deaths and US$1 billion in damage in that country.).

On August 27, 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten is killed when Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists detonate a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V. Mountbatten, a war hero, elder statesman, and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was spending the day with his family in Donegal Bay off Ireland’s northwest coast when the bomb exploded. Three others were killed in the attack, including Mountbatten’s 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas. Later that day, an IRA bombing attack on land killed 18 British paratroopers in County Down, Northern Ireland.

Five members of the Communist Workers Party, participating in a “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, are shot to death by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. Several others were wounded in what became known as the Greensboro massacre.

Student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini send shock waves across America when they storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. The radical Islamic fundamentalists took 90 hostages. The students were enraged that the deposed Shah had been allowed to enter the United States for medical treatment and they threatened to murder hostages if any rescue was attempted. Days later, Iran’s provincial leader resigned, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s fundamentalist revolutionaries, took full control of the country—and the fate of the hostages.

On November 12, 1979, President Jimmy Carter responds to a potential threat to national security by stopping the importation of petroleum from Iran.

On November 13, 1979, in the middle of a game at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins leaps over Kansas City Kings forward Bill Robinzine and slam-dunks the basketball, shattering the glass backboard. The result, according to people who were at the game, was a sound like a bomb going off in the middle of the court. Shards of glass were everywhere: They nicked Robinzine all over his legs and arms and gotten stuck in Dr. J’s Afro. “It wasn’t really a safe thing to do,” Dawkins said later, “but it was a Darryl Dawkins thing to do.”

Thomas McMahon, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is sentenced to life imprisonment for preparing and planting the bomb that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others three months before.

A New Zealand sightseeing plane traveling over Antarctica crashes, killing all 257 people on board, on November 28, 1979. It was the worst airplane accident in New Zealand’s history.

Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on December 3, 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside. It would be one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history.

On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. “When you buy any other car,” ads said, “all you end up with is today’s car. When you get a Pacer, you get a piece of tomorrow.” By 1979, however, sales had faded considerably. Today, polls and experts agree: The Pacer was one of the worst cars of all time.

On December 9, 1979, a commission of scientists declare smallpox has been eradicated. The disease, which carries around a 30 percent chance of death for those who contract it, is the only infectious disease afflicting humans that has officially been eradicated.

On December 17, 1979, Hollywood stuntman Stan Barrett blasts across a dry lakebed at California’s Edwards Air Force Base in a rocket- and missile-powered car, becoming, many believe, the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound on land. He did not set an official record, however. The radar scanner was acting up, and so Barrett’s top speed—739.666 miles per hour by the most reliable measure—was only an estimate. Also, he only drove his rocket car across the lakebed once, not twice as official record guidelines require.

On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, under the pretext of upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of 1978.

In an attempt to stabilize the turbulent political situation in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sends 75,000 troops to enforce the installation of Babrak Karmal as the new leader of the nation. The new government and the imposing Soviet presence, however, had little success in putting down antigovernment rebels. Thus began nearly 10 years of an agonizing, destructive, and ultimately fruitless Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.