1972

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

political events

President Nixon arrives at Beijing (Peking) February 20 with his wife, Pat, and his national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger, now 48, to confer with Chairman Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) and Premier Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), ending the U.S. hostility toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) that has persisted since 1949. Nixon has kept his secretary of state William P. Rogers in the dark about Kissinger's negotiations (see 1973); a U.S. table-tennis team visited the PRC last year, initiating an era of "Ping-Pong diplomacy," a subsequent visit by Kissinger has paved the way for a resumption of normal relations, and Chairman Mao has invited Nixon, who 6 days earlier has ordered that U.S. trade with the People's Republic be on the same basis as trade with the USSR and Soviet-bloc nations. The PRC and the United States both seek more leverage in their opposition to Moscow.

Beijing's UN ambassador lays claim March 3 to Hong Kong and Macao and reasserts claims to the uninhabited Senkalu Islands claimed also by Japan; a PRC UN delegate charges Japan with expansionism.

Premier Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) meets with North Vietnam's Premier Pham Van Dong to assure him that China has made no secret commitments to President Nixon with regard to Indochina, where hostilities continue.

The Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention opened for signature April 10 is the world's first multilateral disarmament treaty banning production and use of an entire category of weapons. Supplementing the 1925 Geneva protocol, it will come into effect March 26, 1975, but while it outlaws development, production, and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxic weapons and provides for their destruction it fails to establish any formal regime to monitor compliance. Soviet and U.S. scientists will continue to develop deadly chemical weapons of mass destruction (see anthrax release, 1979).

U.S. planes bomb Haiphong and Hanoi April 16. The B-52 raids are the first on the big North Vietnamese cities since 1968 and heated debate on the resumption of bombing begins in the U.S. Senate April 19 as North Vietnamese MiG-21 fighter jets attack U.S. destroyers that are shelling coastal positions.

The provincial capital Quang Tri falls to the North Vietnamese May 1, 80 U.S. advisers are evacuated, and South Vietnam's Third Division flees to the South. Saigon relieves the commander of the division, who later claims to have resigned; more than 150,000 flee the imperial capital of Hue as deserters loot the city, engage in gunfights among themselves, and set fire to the marketplace; President Thieu visits Hue and gives military police authority to shoot looters and arsonists, communist forces surround Kontum and Pleiku, Saigon fails in efforts to reopen the supply route between the two beleaguered cities, and U.S. planes mine the approaches to Haiphong while intensifying raids on communist transport lines.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dies at Washington, D.C., May 2 at age 77, and his body lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda before burial. He has directed the bureau for 48 years, being allowed to remain in office through special presidential dispensation despite rumors that he is a cross-dresser who holds power by keeping files on the indiscretions of leading politicians, including heads of state.

Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D. N.Y.) introduces a resolution May 9 calling for the impeachment of President Nixon following his decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors. Chinese, Soviet, North Vietnamese, and Mongolian representatives meet at Beijing (Peking) May 19 to speed aid to North Vietnam following the U.S. action in mining Haiphong and other North Vietnamese ports.

President Nixon arrives at Moscow May 22 and confers with Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in the first visit of a U.S. president to the Soviet Union since 1945. Nixon also visits Teheran and Warsaw. The Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Systems (ABS) Treaty signed at Moscow May 26 and ratified by the U.S. Senate August 3 goes into force October 3, with the signatories pledged to have only two ABM deployment areas each, located in a way that bars them from providing a nationwide ABM defense or becoming the basis for developing such a defense. Wishing to avert an arms race in outer space and depending on mutual vulnerability (or Mutually Assured Destruction [MAD]) to keep the peace, both parties agree also to limit qualitative improvement of their ABM technology (but see Reagan, 1983).

Japan regains Okinawa May 15 after 27 years of U.S. occupation. Two U.S. hunters on Guam have discovered former Japanese Army soldier Shoichi Yokoi, 56, in January and marched him at gunpoint to a local police station. When U.S. troops took Guam in 1944, some Japanese soldiers committed suicide rather than surrender, but Yokoi and more than 1,000 others hid in the jungle; after his comrades were captured or died of starvation or disease, Yokoi lived in a cave for 27 years, surviving on fish, frogs, fruit, nuts, rats, shrimp, and snails. He is returned to Japan, given an audience with Emperor Hirohito, and marries, but while some Japanese hail him as a hero others regard his behavior as antiquated silliness.

Japan's prime minister Eisaku Sato resigns in June after 7½ years in office and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party elects machine politician Kakuei Tanaka, 54, prime minister. Unlike the Tokyo University law school professors who have held the office since World War II, Tanaka went into the contracting business straight out of high school. He sets out to "remodel the Japanese archipelago" by moving much of the nation's industry and workforce from the overcrowded Tokyo-Osaka-Nagoya area to the back country, but although his plan meets with wide popularity his contractor friends receive inside information on what is to be built where and when (see 1974).

Nepal's king Mahendra bir Bikram Shah Dev dies January 21 after an autocratic 16-year reign in which he has dissolved the elected parliament, banned political parties, but opened his country to extensive tourism. He is succeeded by his 26-year-old son, who will be crowned in February 1975 and continue his late father's policies, reigning as Birendra bir Bikram Shah Dev (see 1990).

Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) proclaims herself a sovereign state in January with Mujibur Rahman, 51, as the new nation's first prime minister (see 1971). Jailed briefly in his teens for agitating against British rule, Rahman studied law and political economy at universities in Calcutta and Dacca, cofounded the Awami League in 1949, advocating political economy for East Pakistan, and his arrest in the late 1960s incited mob violence, setting the stage for independence (but see 1975).

Ceylon becomes a republic May 22 and changes her name to Sri Lanka, but ethnic strife between the largely Buddhist Sinhalese and a mostly Hindu Tamil minority has roiled the island for decades and will intensify as the Tamils demand a separate state (see 1983).

India and Pakistan sign a treaty in July calling for peaceful negotiations over the issue of Kashmir (see 1971). India continues her claim of sovereignty over the entire state, and it remains a source of contention (see 1989). Former Indian governor general Chakravarti Rajagoplachari dies at Madras December 25 at age 93.

Philippines president Ferdinand E. Marcos declares martial law September 21 in response to an alleged "communist rebellion" (see 1965). Now 55, he closes Congress, has suspected activists arrested, and assumes the near-dictatorial powers that he will retain for 14 years, instituting a fascist-style regime that will enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of human rights (see 1981).

Australia's prime minister William McMahon resigns late in the year following the defeat of his Liberal Party by the Labor Party, which regains power under the leadership of Gough Whitlam, 56, who has been supported by publisher Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper the Australian. Murdoch denies Whitlam's charge that he has demanded to be made ambassador to London in return for his support; Whitlam will hold office until he is dismissed in 1975.

U.S. B-52s attack Hanoi for 12 days in December, dropping explosives that kill thousands and destroy almost everything except the North Vietnamese determination to survive.

Denmark's Frederik IX dies at Copenhagen January 14 at age 72 after a 25-year reign. He is succeeded by his daughter, 31, who will reign as Margrethe II.

"Bloody Sunday" January 30 in Northern Ireland sees 13 Roman Catholics shot dead by British troops at Londonderry, where riots have followed a civil rights march conducted in defiance of a government ban. The Irish Republican Army calls a general strike January 31 to protest the shootings, and an estimated 25,000 demonstrators rally in protest at Dublin February 2, destroying the British Embassy by fire. Britain imposes direct rule over Northern Ireland March 30 after years of violence between Catholics and Protestants: 467 Northern Irish are killed in the course of the year (see 1973).

The duke of Windsor who reigned briefly as Britain's Edward VIII dies of cancer at Paris May 28 at age 77.

Gunmen hired by Palestinian guerrillas shoot up Lod Airport near Tel Aviv May 30, killing 24 and wounding 76. Two of the gunmen are Japanese, two are killed by security guards, an Israeli court convicts Kozo Okamoto and sentences him July 17 to life imprisonment.

Egypt's president Anwar el-Sadat abruptly expels 20,000 Soviet advisers in July and opens a secret line of communications with Washington, hoping that the United States might influence Israel to return occupied regions in return for Egyptian help in ridding the Middle East of Soviet involvement (but see 1973).

Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah dies of cancer at Bucharest April 27 at age 62.

Uganda's Idi Amin asks Israel for the wherewithal to attack Tanzania, where former president Milton Obote has taken refuge and tries to regain his country through a military coup (see 1971). The Israelis refuse, and Amin travels to Libya, whose Col. Qaddafi promises to help, whereupon Amin orders 500 Israelis out of his country, aborting some major building projects as he bombs some Tanzanian towns and purges his army of Acholi and Lango officers. Printing money to cover his expenditures, Amin rages against Jews and Zionism; he announces August 5 that all Ugandans of Asian origin with British passports must leave the country within 90 days. Most of the 40,000 people involved are third-generation descendants of workers brought by the British from the Indian sub-continent; they are allowed to take with them only what they can carry, most go to Britain, and Amin launches a wave of terror against dissidents, bringing them to the Nile Mansions Hotel at Kampala for interrogation and torture as his killer squads begin a campaign of abduction, rape, and murder (see 1976).

Dahomey (later Benin) has a coup d'état in October: Mathieu Kérókou overthrows the triumvirate that has ruled since 1970 and will have himself elected president repeatedly through the end of the century (see Benin, 1975).

A U.S. Federal Election Campaign Act signed into law by President Nixon February 7 limits campaign spending in the media to 10¢ per person of voting age in the candidate's constituency and requires that all campaign contributions be reported. Both parties but especially the Republicans receive millions in contributions before the new law takes effect April 7 (see 1974).

A "confidential" memorandum released to newspapers February 29 by columnist Jack Anderson links a Justice Department settlement favoring ITT in pending antitrust suits to an ITT commitment to supply funds for the Republican National Convention to be held at San Diego.

Former congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D. N.Y.), is flown from Bimini to Miami April 4 and dies in a hospital there that night at age 63 from complications following prostate surgery; retired Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes dies at Columbia, S.C., April 9 at age 92.

The U.S. Central Security Service established under the 20-year-old National Security Agency (NSA) will become the nation's largest employer of mathematicians. Headquartered at Fort Meade, Md., the agency aims to promote a full partnership between the NSA, the National Cryptological School, and the military's cryptology people; its director is required by law to be a military officer.

The U.S. Navy begins using F-14 fighter planes, designed in the 1960s and built by Grumman Corp. A successor to the F-4 Phantom II jet, the new plane is powered by two Pratt & Whitney or General Electric turbofan engines capable of generating 21,000 to 27,000 pounds of thrust with afterburning and can fly at twice the speed of sound at high altitudes. The radar-intercept officer seated behind the pilot can track up to 24 enemy aircraft at distances up to 195 miles while guiding long-range missiles to six of those enemy planes. Production of the F-14 will continue until 1992.

Gov. Wallace of Alabama campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination but is shot three times at Laurel, Md., May 15 by would-be assassin Arthur H. Bremer, 22, while addressing a crowd before a forthcoming primary election. Wallace's spine is severed and he will be a paraplegic until his death in 1998; frustrated in an earlier attempt to assassinate President Nixon, Bremer is sentenced in June to a 63-year prison term for attempted murder.

The Watergate affair that will grow into the greatest constitutional crisis thus far in U.S. history has its beginnings at 2 o'clock in the morning of June 17 when District of Columbia police arrest five men inside Democratic Party national headquarters in Washington's new Watergate apartment complex. Security guard Frank Wills, 24, has found a door taped open and alerted police, who seize Bernard L. Barker, 55, James W. McCord, 42, Eugenio R. Martinez, 48, Frank A. Sturgis (Fiorini), 47, and Virgilio R. Gonzalez, 46, with cameras and electronic surveillance equipment. President Nixon's campaign manager John Mitchell states June 18 that they were not "operating either on our behalf or with our consent," but Nixon's office confirms June 19 that Barker met earlier in June with CIA official E. Howard Hunt, 53, who until March 29 had been acting as consultant to presidential counsel Charles W. Colson, 38. Nixon tells Colson June 20 that he is involved in a "dangerous job." Hunt has earlier directed CIA activities against Cuba's prime minister Fidel Castro, and three of the men arrested are Cubans, but the motive for their break-in and the source of their support remains a mystery. President Nixon meets June 23 with his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and says, "The only way to solve this, and we're set up beautifully to do it, is for us to have [Deputy CIA Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director Pat] Gray and say, 'Stay the hell out of this . . . [The CIA] should call the FBI and say that, 'We wish, for the good of the country, [that you] don't [look] any further into this case.' Period" (the secret White House taping system installed by Nixon records the conversation; see 1973).

Sen. George S. McGovern, 49, (S.D.) receives the Democratic nomination for the presidency at Miami Beach (Republican operatives have aborted the campaign of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, 58, [Me.], who had led Nixon in opinion polls). McGovern selects Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, 42, (Mo.) as his running mate but switches to former Peace Corps director R. Sargent Shriver Jr., 56, when Eagleton turns out to have been treated for manic depression. "Peace is at hand" in Vietnam, says Henry A. Kissinger on the eve of election, and President Nixon wins reelection despite gossip about the Watergate break-in. McGovern carries only Massachusetts with its 17 electoral votes, Nixon receives 47 million votes, 521 electoral votes, to 29 million for McGovern in the most one-sided presidential election since 1936.

Barbara Jordan wins election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she will serve her Texas congressional district for three terms. She is the first black woman ever to be elected to Congress from a Southern state.

Former congressman Martin Dies of Dies Committee (Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities) notoriety dies at Lufkin, Texas, November 14 at age 71; former president Harry S. Truman at Independence, Mo., December 26 at age 88; former Canadian prime minister (and 1957 Nobel Peace Prize winner) Lester B. Pearson of liver cancer at Ottawa December 27 at age 75.

Peru resumes diplomatic relations with Cuba. President Velasco Alvarado has chosen to part company with the U.S. policy of isolating the Cubans.

Guatemalan rebels who include Rolando Moran (Ricardo Ramírez), 41, form the Guerrilla Army of the Poor that has been inspired by the revolt of Cuba's Fidel Castro. The son of an army colonel, Ramírez uses a nom de guerre and the Indian factor in Guatemalan politics and society, arguing that the "ethnic-national struggle" is as important as the class struggle; he will help make his group the largest of the country's four leftist factions (see 1982).

Puerto Rico's governor Luis A. Ferré loses his bid for reelection as the Popular Democratic Party regains power under the leadership of Rafael Hernández Colón.

human rights, social justice

Civil rights activist Jessie Daniel Ames dies at Austin, Texas, February 21 at age 90.

The U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) receives enforcement powers in March and begins taking noncomplying companies to court. An EOC report says that America's largest employer of women—American Telephone & Telegraph, its subsidiaries, and 24 operating companies nationwide—is also "without doubt the largest oppressor of women workers in the United States." It will compel AT&T to give $38 million in back pay to women and minorities.

The U.S. Public Health Service terminates its 40-year-old "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" following publicity about what clearly was a racist program, although it began with good intentions at a time when syphilis was ravaging parts of the South in epidemic form. The study involved 600 poor Macon County, Ala., blacks, 399 of them with syphilis; told merely that they had "bad blood," all received free meals, free medical exams, and burial insurance, but they were not offered penicillin when it became the standard treatment for syphilis in the mid-1940s, given no chance to quit the study, and allowed to go blind and insane without intervention (see 1997).

The Soviet Union begins collecting an "education tax" on would-be emigrants in the spring, justifying the effort to discourage a "brain drain" by insisting that the state be repaid for the education it has provided. Aimed primarily at Jews, the tax is far too high for anyone to afford (see commerce [Jackson-Vanik Amendment], 1973).

The U.S. Senate votes 84 to 8 March 22 to submit an Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Rep. Martha Griffiths (née Wright), 60, (D. Mich.) is credited with having devised the strategy that got the proposed amendment out of committee. Hawaii is the first state to ratify; getting enough other states to join will prove difficult.

The Pink Panthers movement founded by Japanese pharmacist Misako Enoki, 33, will hold sit-ins and protest rallies and focus on women's rights to abortion, equal hiring, equal pay, equitable property settlements and alimony, and easier access to contraceptive pills, which in Japan can be dispensed only as medicine, not as birth control aids, and only by doctors, most of whom are men. Members of the radical feminist group wear white military uniforms with pink helmets and will grow to number 4,000 (but see 1977).

Israeli women reject "women's lib," according to a poll conducted by Hebrew University sociologists who have interviewed hundreds of women in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Nearly two-thirds favor a large family, 75 percent think being "a good mother and a good homemaker" is woman's most noble goal, only 8 percent favor married women holding jobs outside the home "as a means of self-expression," and fewer than 5 percent consider sexual attraction sufficient reason for going to bed with a man. "Women's lib is just a lot of foolishness," Prime Minister Golda Meir tells a group of visiting U.S. women. "It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about it." But thousands of Israeli women whose marriages have failed are unable to obtain legal divorces because a wife may not be granted a divorce without her husband's consent, and ultra-Orthodox parties block any change in the law.

Canada's National Action Committee on the Status of Women is founded through the efforts of feminist columnist and broadcast journalist Laura Villela Sabia, 55, who has rallied more than 30 women's lobbying groups to force the creation of a royal commission on the subject.

philanthropy

Social reformer Saul Alinsky dies at his Carmel, Calif., home June 12 at age 63.

exploration, colonization

President Nixon signs a bill January 5 authorizing a $5.5 billion 6-year program to develop a space-shuttle craft that will lift off as a rocket and return to earth as an airplane.

The unmanned U.S. spacecraft Pioneer 10 lifts off from Cape Kennedy March 2 on a 639-day, 620 million-mile journey past the planet Jupiter.

The Soviet space craft Venus 8 makes a soft landing on the planet Venus in March.

U.S. Apollo 16 astronauts Charles M. Duke Jr., Thomas K. Mattingly, and John W. Young blast off April 16 from Cape Kennedy on a flight of nearly 255 hours. Young and Duke spend a record 71 hours, 2 minutes on the surface of the moon beginning April 20 and return with 214 pounds of lunar soil and rock.

commerce

Time-and-motion study pioneer Lillian Gilbreth dies at Phoenix, Ariz., January 2 at age 93.

The European Economic Community (Common Market or EEC) created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome accepts Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway to membership with the Treaty of Brussels signed January 22. The House of Commons acts July 14 to permit British participation (see 1971), and the EEC expands to embrace 20 nations with 257 million people in the world's most powerful trading block, but Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak, who helped to found the EEC, dies at Brussels July 31 at age 73, and Norway votes to remain outside the EEC.

British coal miners walk out in January for the first time in nearly 50 years, demanding an 11 percent rise in the basic wage that remains below $50 per week. Called by Lancashire-born National Union of Mineworkers president Joe Gormley, 53, the strike continues for 7 weeks before the 280,000 miners accept a settlement. London area rail workers strike in April in an effort to bring their wages to an average of $78 per week, the strike spreads a week later to stop rail traffic throughout the country, the workers agree to a 14-day cooling off period after 4 days, but wildcat strikes continue to slow service (see 1974; politics, 1974).

The richest 10 percent of Britons hold 51 percent of the nation's wealth, down from 83 percent in 1960. After-tax income commanded by the richest 10 percent falls to 23.6 percent, down from 34.6 percent in 1939. The richest 1 percent still holds one fourth of the nation's wealth despite high inheritance taxes.

The Star of Sierra Leone discovered in Africa February 14 weighs 969.8 carats, making it the third largest gem-quality diamond ever found. Government troops and police guard the diamond fields in place of the white mercenaries who guarded them before independence in 1961, but illegal mining continues alongside the operations of international companies, whose diamonds are the chief source of the country's foreign exchange and crucial to her economic development (see politics, 1992).

A strike by 42,000 British dock workers begins July 28 as dockers act to protect their jobs, idling 500 to 600 ships. The action prevents export goods from leaving the country until August 17.

U.S. wages, prices, and profits remain controlled by Phase II economic measures; the savings rate in America is 7.6 percent.

Amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935 signed into law by President Nixon October 30 provide for increases in benefits geared to cost-of-living increases (see 1956); a Supplemental Security income system (SSI) provides means-tested assistance for the elderly and disabled poor.

The National Welfare Rights Organization founded by Los Angeles "welfare mother" Johnnie Tillmon, 46, mobilizes people and resources to focus attention on the nation's welfare system, whose multi-layered inequities are encouraging the real and fraudulent breakup of marriages when men cannot support their wives and children.

Chile's president Salvador Allende continues to nationalize his country's large industrial firms (see 1973; food shortages, 1971).

The United States enters the international money market July 19, selling German marks at decreasing prices in the first move since August of last year to shore up the dollar.

German industrialist Friedrich Flick dies at Konstanz July 20 at age 89, having been imprisoned for war crimes from 1947 to 1951. He leaves upwards of $1 billion to his playboy son but not a pfennig to the families of the 48,000 slave laborers who worked in his mines and factories during World War II (an estimated 80 percent of them died as a result of their poor treatment).

Former labor leader Rose Schneiderman dies at New York August 11 at age 88; women now represent 38 percent of the U.S. workforce. Australia orders equal pay for women December 15.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 1003.16 November 14, up 6.00 to cross the 1000 mark for the first time in history, but a front-page Wall Street Journal article says "little market significance" should be attached to it; the Dow climbs to 1036.27 December 11 but falls sharply December 18 at news of a breakdown in Vietnam peace talks. The market value of stocks held by America's 66.7 million households totals $1 trillion (net assets of mutual funds total $59.8 billion), although the average household has a net worth of only $65,517 and the median household income is $9,129 per year (59 percent of households have two or more earners); gold prices for the year average $63.9 per troy ounce. The Dow closes December 29 at 1020.02, up from 890.20 at the end of 1971.

energy

Former General Electric president Charles E. "Engine Charlie" Wilson dies at Bronxville, N.Y., January 3 at age 85.

The Buffalo Creek flood disaster in West Virginia February 26 leaves 125 dead, 1,100 injured, and more than 4,000 homeless (see 1968). The Department of the Interior warned state officials in 1967 that dams on Buffalo Creek and 29 others throughout West Virginia were unstable and dangerous. Gushing at an average of seven feet per second, the 15- to 20-foot wave of black water destroys town after town in its path, demolishing 502 houses and 42 mobile homes, damaging 943 others, wrecking 1,000 cars and trucks, and causing property damage estimated at $50 million. Most of the flood victims are coal miners and their families, the dead and missing will prove to include 42 children aged 16 or under, but Gov. Arch Moore bars journalists from the area to prevent what he calls "irresponsible reporting." "The only real sad part," he says, "is that the state of West Virginia has taken a terrible beating that is worst than the disaster."

Mexican prospectors strike oil outside Villahermosa in May. The new Chiapas-Tabasco field will prove to be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, surpassing even the Venezuelan field in the Lake Maracaibo area. Mexico's proven reserves will total 16.8 billion barrels by 1978, and the potential will be estimated at 120 billion.

Baghdad nationalizes Iraq Petroleum's Kirkuk field June 1 (see 1927). The field produces 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day, it is the first key field to be seized by an Arab Persian Gulf nation, Iraq Petroleum threatens action against anyone who buys the oil, and by year's end Iraq is producing only 660,000 barrels per day (Baghdad leaves Basrah Petroleum untouched), down from 1.9 million at the beginning of the year (see 1973).

Nearly 30 percent of U.S. petroleum is imported, up from 20 percent in 1967.

An international uranium cartel organized in the spring has Canadian, Australian, and South African sponsorship with tacit support from France. Members will try to eliminate outside competition, and the price of raw uranium ("yellowcake") will jump from $6 a pound to $41 in the next few years, but rising oil prices imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will be largely responsible for the sudden boom in demand for nuclear fuels and the climb in uranium prices, not any actions by the cartel.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announces August 7 that it has signed a cooperative agreement with industry to build a liquid metal fast breeder reactor on Tennessee's Clinch River (see 1971; 1973).

transportation

The 83,000-ton Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth launched in 1938 catches fire in Hong Kong's bay January 9 during a luncheon for the colony's business elite (seeQE2, 1969; 1974); the blaze continues for 48 hours, and the ship has to be scrapped.

The Globtik Tokyo launched in Japan is a $56 million 476,025-ton supertanker that dwarfs the 366,813-ton Nisseki Maru launched last year, raising the possibility of a "megaton tanker" with a capacity of a million tons. Indian entrepreneur Ravi Tikkoo, 40, founded Globtik Tankers with $2,500 in 1967 after 3 years of working at London as a middleman between ship owners and bankers.

Japan's San-Yo Shin Kansen (New San-Yo Line) railroad opens in April to link Osaka with Okayama 103 miles to the south. Built to even higher standards than the 8-year-old Tokaido line, the new line can handle speeds of 155 miles per hour and is the first stage of a new expansion that will extend the wide-track railroad to Kyushu.

Amtrak increases Metroliner service between New York and Washington to 14 daily round trips, up from six in 1969. (Eastern Airlines operates 16 daily shuttle flights between the two cities.)

The Erie Lackawanna Railroad files for bankruptcy protection June 26, having suffered an estimated $9.2 million in damages caused by hurricane Agnes 4 days earlier (see 1961; Conrail, 1976).

New York City transit fares rise January 5 to 35¢, up from 30¢ (see 1970; 1975).

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) that goes into service September 11 is the first new U.S. regional transit system in more than 50 years, but mechanical problems plague the sleek aluminum-bodied trains from the start. The automated system has been completed 3 years behind schedule and cost $1.6 billion instead of the projected $120 million. Its 71 miles of track link San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley with subway and elevated lines that extend to a score of smaller cities to the south and east, but some trains stall beneath the bay and accidents occur.

New Jersey voters reject a $650 million transportation bond issue in November. Environmentalists have objected that too much of the money was earmarked for highways, too little for mass transit.

British motorcar producers turn out a record 1.92 million cars; by 1982 production will have fallen to less than half that number.

General Motors has sales of $30 billion, marketing 537,268 Chevrolet Impalas.

Authorities at New York's Kennedy Airport begin random searches in February to discourage hijackers; the German government pays the hijackers of a jumbo jet $5 million February 25 to release the plane's passengers; Israeli paratroopers disguised as maintenance workers end a 23-hour hijacking episode at Tel Aviv May 9 when they board a Sabena jet, kill two Arab males, and capture two women (five of the 100 passengers and crew are wounded); commercial pilots in more than 30 countries go on strike in mid-June to protest "skyjacking"; a hijacker parachutes out of an American Airlines plane over Indiana June 24 with $502,000 in ransom money; two British women aboard an El Al jet are injured August 16 when a last-minute gift received from an Arab acquaintance blows up; American and TWA announce August 29 that they will soon begin inspecting the luggage of all passengers before they board; Cuban hijackers take 31 hostages on a Southern Airways plane November 12 (the men are arrested at Havana, Premier Castro says they will be tried, and diplomatic moves begin to thwart such incidents).

A British plane crash June 18 kills 118 in the nation's worst such disaster thus far; a Soviet-built East German Ilyushin plane crashes at East Berlin August 14, killing 156; Uruguayan Air Force plane crashes in the Andes October 13. Of the 45 men aboard, 29 are killed on impact or from subsequent avalanches, the 16 survivors include eight rugby players, they all live on dried fruit and candy until their supplies are exhausted, and after trying to get along on soup made from lichens they resort to cannibalism, enabling them to live for 69 days until the survivors reach safety; a Spanish charter jet carrying West German tourists crashes on takeoff at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Island December 3, killing all 155 abroad; an Eastern Airlines Lockheed 1011 Tristar jumbo jet crashes into Florida's Everglades December 30, killing 101 of the 186 aboard.

British Airways (formerly BOAC) orders five Concorde supersonic jets July 18; Air France orders four (see 1971; 1976).

Singapore Airlines is created by a split-up of Malaysia-Singapore Airlines and begins promoting itself with a "Singapore Girl" to symbolize Asian hospitality, drawing criticism from feminists. Flight attendants wear skirts and blouses but in two years will switch to sarongs and sandals, helping the new carrier gain widespread recognition.

Aeronautical engineer Igor Sikorsky dies at Easton, Conn., October 26 at age 83.

technology

Intel introduces the 8008 microchip; it contains 3,500 transistors as compared to the 2,300 in last year's 4004 (see 8086 microchip, 1978).

Designer Paul Rand creates the eight-bar IBM design that will serve as the company's logotype for more than 30 years.

Texas Instruments develops the first commercially successful electronic pocket calculator (see 1971).

The digital quartz watch Pulsar introduced by HMW is the first production-model digital wristwatch (see 1967). It sells for $2,100, but companies such as Fairchild, National Semiconductor, and Texas Instruments will soon be mass-producing the watches, researchers at RCA and Kent State University will develop digital watches with liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and within a few years such watches will be available at $20 and less as Japanese and other Asian manufacturers undersell the Swiss.

science

A human skull found in northern Kenya by Richard Leakey and Glynn Isaac allegedly dates the first humans to 2.5 million B.C. and opens a new controversy on the age of man (see 1959; 1975).

Zoologist and morphologist Sir Gavin de Beer dies at Alfriston, Sussex, June 21 at age 72; paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey at London October 1 at age 69.

medicine

A new Surgeon General's Report on smoking issued January 10 warns that nonsmokers exposed to cigarette smoke may suffer health hazards (see 1964). Later evidence will show that carbon monoxide and other toxins in "sidestream" or "secondhand" smoke actually present greater perils to nonsmokers than to smokers, bringing new pressure to protect airline passengers (and flight attendants), office workers, and others from the minority whose cigarette smoke threatens their health and comfort.

Pacemakers for heart patients gain more enthusiasts through the development of long-lasting lithium batteries and a method to prevent leakage of bodily fluids into the devices (see 1958). By the late 1980s there will be pacemakers that can sense the variable patterns of the heart's electrical system and adjust to many body demands. Later models will weigh as little as half an ounce, automatically adjust for a slower heart rate at rest, and last for 5 to 20 years. By the time the original pacemaker recipient dies of melanoma at Stockholm in December 2001 an estimated 3 million people will be on pacemakers, from newborns to centenarians, and half will be Americans.

The United States stops requiring routine vaccinations of civilians against smallpox; the disease has been eradicated from Central America, Europe, and North America since the 1950s, it will be eradicated worldwide before 1980, but most countries will continue to require vaccinations until then (see 1976).

Work by Edinburgh researchers on alpha-feta protein (AFP) provides a means of testing amniotic fluid from pregnant women for the presence of anencephaly defects, where the fetal brain fails to develop, or spina bifida (divided spine). If AFP results indicate a high level of risk, the woman can be referred for amniocentesis or further testing.

Medical scientist Colin M. MacLeod dies at London February 11 at age 63 while en route to Bangladesh on a cholera-related mission for the U.S. Public Health Service; cortisone synthesizer and thyroid-gland expert Edward C. Kendall dies at Princeton, N.J., May 4 at age 86; Nobel physiologist Max Theiler of lung cancer at his New Haven, Conn., home August 11 at age 73, having seen his 17-D vaccine against yellow fever become widely adopted worldwide; Iron Lung inventor Philip Drinker dies at Fitzwilliam, N.H., October 19 at age 77, having seen polio vaccines largely eliminate the need for his mechanical breathing machine.

religion

The papal encyclical Pacem in Terris issued April 9 appeals to all Christians of good will, not just Roman Catholics, but the Greek Orthodox archbishop rejects the bid for unity, saying that his followers will never accept papal infallibility.

The ecumenical patriarch and archbishop of Istanbul Athenagoras I dies at that city July 7 at age 86, having agreed with Pope Pius VI in 1965 to a revocation of the mutual excommunication decrees of 1054.

Pope Paul VI acts September 14 to abolish the tonsure—the symbolic circular shaving of the head that seminarians have undergone since the end of the fifth century to indicate a "renunciation of the world." Hereafter it will be an option for individual priests and their orders.

education

The University of Virginia's board of visitors recommends that George Mason College separate from its parent institution (see 1966). A General Assembly act signed into law by the governor April 7 establishes George Mason University as an independent member of the state's higher-education system. It will soon acquire the George Mason University School of Law, acquire a campus at Arlington in 1979, and open a Prince William County campus in 1997 as it attracts prominent scholars and artists in a variety of fields.

Five Oxford colleges agree April 28 to break 750 years of tradition and admit women. Other Oxford colleges have had women students since the 1920s, and there have been women colleges at Oxford since the founding of Somerville in 1879.

Westminster School and other English public schools admit girls for the first time.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) files suit on behalf of black parents in Boston, charging that the city's School Committee has discriminated against black children by creating a segregated school system (Tallulah Morgan v. James W. Hennigan) (see 1974).

Title IX of a higher education aid bill signed into law by President Nixon June 23 bans sex bias in athletics and other activities at all educational institutions receiving federal aid. Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 include one authorizing a Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program based on a proposal by former University of California president Clark Kerr; it will be renamed the Pell Grant Program in honor of New York-born Sen. Claiborne (de Borda) Pell, 53 (D., R.I.), who has championed federal monetary aid to full- or part-time undergraduate students who exhibit financial need.

communications, media

Federal Express is founded at Memphis by local millionaire Frederick W. Smith, 27, a Vietnam veteran whose father built the Greyhound bus system in the South. Smith has raised $72 million in venture capital—the largest such capital assemblage yet—to start an overnight delivery service with its own aircraft (14 French-built Falcon jets) and fleet of trucks. On its first night of operation next year it will deliver 16 packages. By the time it adds letter delivery in 1981 the company will be handling 100,000 parcels and letters nightly, a number that will grow to 1 million by 1989 (see Kinko's, 2003).

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward, 29, and Carl Bernstein, 28, begin to crack open the Watergate affair, working 12- to 18-hour days 7 days per week. Geneva, Ill.-born journalist Robert (Upshur) Woodward and his Washington-born colleague Bernstein have been on the paper's police beat when called upon to cover the arraignment of five men arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee's offices. Idaho-born deputy FBI director W. (William) Mark Felt, 59, tells them to "follow the money" (Felt's identity will remain secret until the spring of 2005), and on August 1 they report a financial link between the Watergate break-in and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP); on September 16 they report that campaign finance chairman Maurice H. Stans, 64, and CREEP aides control a "secret fund"; on September 17 they report withdrawals from the fund by CREEP executive Jeb Stuart Magruder, 37, and his aide Herbert L. Porter; Bernstein phones Attorney General John N. Mitchell September 28 to say that his paper is about to publish a story on the June 17 break-in at the Watergate apartment complex and is told, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham [Post publisher Katharine Graham, now 54] is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published"; Woodward and Bernstein report September 29 that former attorney general Mitchell actually controls the "secret fund," and their story October 10 begins, "FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President." White House spokesmen denounce the Post stories as "shabby journalism," "mud-slinging," "unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations," and "a political effort by the Washington Post, well conceived and coordinated, to discredit this administration and individuals in it." The Federal Communications Commission receives three license challenges in the next 3 months against Florida TV stations owned by the Post. Most other newspapers, magazines, and television networks give short shrift to the Watergate break-in story, dismissing it as a "caper." The White House continues the intimidation of the press begun in 1969, but President Nixon has the support of 753 U.S. dailies in his bid for reelection; only 56 endorse McGovern.

Ms. magazine begins publication at New York in July with Pennsylvania-born Look veteran Patricia (Theresa) Carbine, 41, as publisher, feminist writer Gloria Steinem, now 38, as editor. A spring preview issue has carried a column headed "What's a Ms.?" and answering it: "For more than 20 years, 'Ms.' has appeared in secretarial handbooks as the suggested form of address when a woman's marital status is unknown, a sort of neutral combination of 'Miss' and 'Mrs.' Now 'Ms.' is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than being identified by their relationship with a man. After all, if 'Mr.' is enough to identify 'male,' then 'Ms.' should be enough to identify 'female!' . . . The use of 'Ms.' isn't meant to protect either the married or the unmarried woman from social pressure—only to signify a female human being. It's symbolic and important. There's a lot in a name" (seeNew York Times, 1974).

Spare Rib magazine begins publication at London to give British feminists a new voice.

Money magazine begins publication in October with an initial circulation of 225,000. Time, Inc. has launched the personal finance monthly, whose circulation will grow to overtake those of Fortune, Forbes, and other financial magazines.

LIFE magazine suspends weekly publication December 29 after 36 years (it will continue as a monthly); more magazines shrink their formats to conform with new postal regulations.

Broadway-Hollywood columnist Walter Winchell dies at Los Angeles February 20 at age 74; France-Soir publisher Pierre Lazareff at Paris April 21 at age 65; gossip columnist Louella Parsons at Santa Monica December 9 at age 91 (her assistant, Dorothy Manners, now 69, has been writing the column since 1964).

literature

Millionaire Howard R. Hughes gives a telephone interview in January disclaiming any knowledge of novelist Clifford M. Irving and the "autobiography" that McGraw-Hill has agreed to publish (see 1971). The publisher has given a $600,000 advance against royalties, Irving's wife has deposited it in the Zürich bank account she opened last year, Harold McGraw backs up Irving's claims and produces manuscript pages annotated in Hughes's handwriting, but McGraw-Hill announces February 10 that it has been the victim of a hoax. Edith Irving is indicted on charges of having represented herself as Helga Hughes; she and her husband will both serve prison terms in connection with the fraud.

Nonfiction: The Limits of Growth, A Report for The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind by a team of MIT scientists using computer techniques developed by MIT systems engineer Jay Forrester, now 54. Projecting a grim future for highly polluted, overpopulated planet with its resources depleted, the book has sales of 9 million copies, revitalizes the environmental movement, but will fall into disrepute when its forecasts fail to materialize; The United States and the Origin of the Cold War, 1941-1947 by Texas-born Ohio University historian John Lewis Gaddis, 31; Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai by Seymour M. Hersh, who is hired by the New York Times for its Washington bureau; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson, who has been global affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine since 1970 and will continue as such until 1984; The Party's Over: The Failure of Politics in America by Chicago Heights-born Washington Post reporter David S. (Salzer) Broder, 42; Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power by Robert D. Novak and Rowland Evans Jr.; The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan and Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era by Zbigniew Brzezinski; Xenophon's Socrates by Leo Strauss; The Mountain People by anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull; The Great Bridge by Pittsburgh-born author David McCullough, 39, is a history of New York's Brooklyn Bridge; The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking (initially The Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking) by English physician-poet-novelist-pacifist Alex Comfort, 52, who condemns the prudery of "squares" and offers advice on "how to treat a partner who is hip for discipline"; Women and Madness and Wonder Woman by Brooklyn-born New York psychiatrist Phyllis Chesler, 31; "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" (pamphlet) by Butte, Mont.-born writer Barbara Ehrenreich (née Alexander), 31, and Washington, D.C.-born film maker Deirdre English, 24; The Foxfire Book by Georgia schoolteacher Eliot Wigginston, 28, who has enlisted the help of his students at the Raburn Gap-Nachoche School to record with camera and tape recorder the traditions, crafts, and folklore of Appalachia.

A faulty timer on his terrorist bomb kills Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli as he tries to blow up an electric pylon outside Milan on the night of March 14. One of the nation's richest men, the 45-year-old scion of an established industrialist (and monarchist) family has been financing Communist Party activities, established a publishing house in 1955, started a bookstore chain, and published Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago despite disapproval from Moscow; author C. W. Ceram (Kurt W. Marek) dies of a coronary collapse at Bonn April 12 at age 57.

Fiction: August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; Manticore by Robertson Davies; The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner; Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed; The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (her most autobiographical novel); The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, 37; The Persian Boy by Mary Renault; The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble, who divorces the father of her three children; An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch; The Friends of Eddie Coyle by Boston journalist-novelist George V. Higgins, 33; How She Died by New York-born novelist Helen Yglesias (née Bassine), 57; Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York by New York-born TV comedy writer-novelist Gail Parent (née Kostner), 32; The Flame and the Flower by Louisiana-born novelist Kathleen (Erin) Woodiwiss (née Wingrove), 33, pioneers the bodice-ripping erotic historical novel; Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Cleveland-born novelist Alix Kates Shulman, 40; The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton; The Exorcist by New York-born novelist William P. (Peter) Blatty, 44; The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum; The Day of the Jackal by English novelist Frederick Forsyth, 34.

Novelist-poet-playwright Dino Buzzati dies at Rome January 28 at age 65; Nobel novelist Yasunari Kawabata takes his own life at Tokyo April 16 at age 68. He won the prize for literature 4 years ago but has reportedly been depressed by the suicide of Yukio Mishima in 1970; critic-novelist Edmund Wilson dies at his Talcottville, N.Y., home June 12 at age 77 (novelist John Updike inherits his chair at the New Yorker magazine); scriptwriter-novelist Sally Benson dies at Woodland Hills, Calif., July 19 at age 71; Jules Romains at Paris August 14 at age 86; novelist-playwright Henri de Montherlant at his native Paris September 21 at age 76; Gladys Schmitt (Pulitzer) at her native Pittsburgh October 3 at age 63; Sir Compton Mackenzie at Edinburgh November 30 at age 89; L. P. Hartley at London December 13 at age 76.

Poetry: Braving the Elements by James Merrill; Up Country: Poems of New England by Maxine Kumin; Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight by Los Angeles-born poet-essayist-jazz critic Stanley Crouch, 26, who has taught at Claremont College since 1969; Monster: Poems by New York feminist poet Robin (Evonne) Morgan, 31; Delusions, etc. by the late John Berryman includes his poem "Walking into the River."

Poet John Berryman commits suicide at Minneapolis January 7 at age 57 by jumping off a bridge into the Mississippi; poet-novelist-painter-graphic designer Kenneth Patchen dies at Palo Alto, Calif., January 8 at age 60; poet-critic Marianne Moore at her New York home February 5 at age 84; poet laureate C. Day Lewis of cancer at the home of his friend Kingsley Amis on the outskirts of London May 22 at age 68; Ezra Pound at Venice November 1 at age 87.

Juvenile: Watership Down by English novelist Richard (George) Adams, 52, whose subjects are rabbits; The Chocolate War by Leominister, Mass., author Robert (Edmund) Cormier, 47; George and Martha by San Antonio-born writer-illustrator James (Edward) Marshall, 30, is about two buck-toothed hippos; Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by New Jersey-born author Judith Viorst, 41; Bear's Picture by Daniel Pinkwater; The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Ohio-born author Barbara Robinson (née Webb), 44, illustrations by Judith Gwyn Brown; The Great Big Alphabet Picture Book with Lots of Words by New York-born author Richard Hefter, 30, illustrations by Martin S. Moskof; Till the Break of Day (autobiography) by Maia Wojciechowska; Freaky Friday by composer-author Mary Rodgers.

art

Painting: Mao (silkscreen and paint on canvas) by Andy Warhol; Madame Cézanne in Rocking Chair by Eizabeth Murray; The Black Jacket and The Blue Umbrella by Alex Katz; Buttercups by Fairfield Porter.

Sculpture: Seedbed by Italian artist Vito Acconci, 32; Lady and Shopping Bags by Duane Hanson, who had his first New York show 2 years ago at the O.K. Harris Gallery in SoHo. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, along with his wife Doris, dies in the garage of his South Pasadena, Calif., home October 5 at age 68, having inhaled carbon monoxide gas; sculptor Joseph Cornell dies at his Flushing, Queens, home December 29 at age 69.

The Kimbell Art Museum opens at Fort Worth, Texas, in a building designed by Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn to house the collection of the late miller and industrialist Kay Kimbell and his wife, Velma.

photography

The Polaroid SX-70 system unveiled in April produces a color print that develops outside the camera while the photographer watches.

The film-less electronic camera patented by Texas Instruments is the first of its kind and will lead to digital cameras for civilian use. The National Space and Aeronautics Agency (NASA) converted in the 1960s from analog to digital signals in its space probes, and the U.S. Government's spy satellites have been using digital imaging (see Sony Mavica, 1981).

Vietnamese Associated Press photographer Hyunh Cong "Nick" Ut, 21, captures an image of 9-year-old Kim Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing naked and in tears down a road 25 miles west of Saigon June 8 after she was napalmed in an offensive launched by Hanoi (he takes her to a hospital, where she will recover after 14 months of treatment); The Tree Where Man Was Born and Birds of North America by Eliot Porter, now 70, whose Kodachrome nature pictures have gained worldwide renown.

theater, film

Theater: Jumpers by Tom Stoppard 2/2 at London's National Theatre (Old Vic), with Michael Hordern, Diana Rigg; Moonchildren by New York-born playwright Michael Weller, 29, 2/21 at New York's Royale Theater, with Kevin Conway, 16 perfs.; Sticks and Bones by Dubuque-born playright David (William) Rabe, 31, 3/1 at New York's John Golden Theater (after 121 perfs. at the off-Broadway Public Theater), with Dayton, Ohio-born actor Tom Aldredge, 44, Elizabeth Wilson, 366 perfs. (total); A Stretch of the Imagination by Australian playwright Jack Hibbard 3/8 at Melbourne's The Pram Factory; Small Craft Warnings by Tennessee Williams 4/2 at New York's off-Broadway Truck and Warehouse Theater, with Helena Carroll, Cherry Davis, Gene Fanning as surviving losers, 200 perfs.; Leaving Home by Canadian playwright David French 5/16 at Toronto's Taragon Theater; The Tooth of Crime by Illinois-born playwright Sam Shepard (Samuel Shepard Rogers), 29, 7/17 at London's Open Space Theatre; That Championship Season by Scranton, Pa.-born playwright Jason Miller, 33, 9/14 at New York's Booth Theater (after 144 perfs. at the off-Broadway Public Theater), with Michael McGuire, Walter McGinn, Richard Dysart, 844 perfs. (total); Sizwe Bansi Is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona 10/8 at Cape Town; 6 Rooms Riv Vu by New York-born playwright Bob Randall (originally Stanley B. Goldstein), 35, 10/17 at New York's Helen Hayes Theater, with Jerry Orbach, Jane Alexander, 247 perfs.; Not I by Samuel Becket 11/22 at New York's Lincoln Center, with Jessica Tandy, Missouri-born actor Henderson Forsythe, 55; The River Niger by Washington, D.C.-born playwright Joseph A. Walker, 37, 12/5 at New York's St. Mark's Playhouse, with Douglas Turner Ward, Frances Foster, Graham Brown, Roxie Roker, Grenna Whitaker (the play will move uptown next spring; 400 perfs. total); The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon 12/20 at New York's Broadhurst Theater, with Jack Albertson, Sam Levene, Lewis J. Stadlen, 538 perfs.

Actress Jessie Royce Landis dies at Danbury, Conn., February 2 at age 65; Shakespearean actress Margaret Webster at Chilmark, Mass., November 13 at age 67.

Television: The Night Stalker 1/11 on ABC with California-born actor Darren McGavin, 49, as journalist Carl Kolchak, New York-born actor Simon Oakland, 49, as his editor in a science-fiction thriller (to 3/28/1975; it will be followed by The Night Strangler; see 1974); Sanford & Son 1/14 on NBC with Redd Foxx (John Elroy Sanford), 44, as Fred Sanford, Dennard Wilson as Lamont (to 9/2/1977); Emergency! 1/22 on NBC with John Gage as Los Angeles County paramedic Randolph Mantooth, Kevin Tighe as paramedic Roy De Soto, songwriter Bobby Troup as neurosurgeon Joe Early, singer-actress Julie London (Troup's wife), as Nurse Dixie McCall (to 7/3/1979; 132 1-hour episodes); Maude 9/12 on CBS with Bea Arthur (to 4/29/1978); The Waltons 9/13 on CBS with Richard Thomas, Connecticut-born actress Michael Learned, 33, Ralph Waite, Will Geer, and Ellen Corby (née Hansen), 59 (to 8/13/1981); The Bob Newhart Show 9/16 on CBS with Oak Park, Ill.-born comedian Newhart, now 43, as Chicago psychiatrist Bob Hardy, Suzanne Pleshette as his schoolteacher wife, Emily (to 8/26/1978; 142 episodes); M*A*S*H 9/17 on NBC with Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce, Wayne Rogers, Loretta Switt (as "Hot Pants" Hoolihan), Gary Burghoff (as "Radar" O'Reilly), Larry Linville, and McLean Stevenson (to 2/28/1983, 251 episodes, with Mike Farrell replacing Rogers, Harry Morgan replacing Stevenson, David Ogden Stiers replacing Linville).

Actor William Boyd of "Hopalong Cassidy" fame dies at South Laguna Beach, Calif., September 12 at age 74.

Films: John Boorman's Deliverance with Jon Voight, Lansing, Mich.-born actor Burt Reynolds, 36, Ned Beatty, author James Dickey; Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie with Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran (Colette Stéphane Jeanmaire Dacheville), 39, Bulle Ogier; Peter Medak's The Ruling Class with Peter O'Toole, Alastair Sim; Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth with Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine; Martin Ritt's Sounder with Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, Kevin Hooks. Also: Billy Wilder's Avanti! with Jack Lemmon; Claude Sautet's César and Rosalie with Romy Schneider, Yves Montand; Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers with Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin; Peter Medak's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg with Alan Bates, Janet Suzman; Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy with Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt; Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather with Marlon Brando, East Harlem, N.Y.-born actor Al (Alfred) Pacino, 32, James Caan, Los Angeles-born actress Diane Keaton (Diane Hall), 23; Cliff Robertson's J. W. Coop with Robertson, Geraldine Page; Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens with Jack Nicholson, Chicago-born actor Bruce Dern, 36, Ellen Burstyn; Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper with Donovan (Leitch), Donald Pleasence; Herbert Ross's Play It Again, Sam with Woody Allen, Diane Keaton; Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman; Joseph Anthony's Tomorrow with Robert Duvall, Olga Bellin; François Truffaut's Two English Girls with Jean-Pierre Leaud; Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid with Burt Lancaster.

Jerry Damiano's pornographic film Deep Throat starring Bronx, N.Y.-born porn star Linda Lovelace (originally Linda Susan Boreman), 22, opens June 11 at the New Mature World Theater on Times Square, celebrities such as Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, and Sammy Davis Jr. help make it chic to see, and although explicit in depicting sex acts it attracts middle-class women as well as men.

Actor Jerome Cowan dies at Encino, Calif., January 24 at age 74; director Walter Lang of a kidney ailment at Palm Springs, Calif., February 8 at age 73; former National Film Board of Canada commissioner John Grierson at Bath, England, February 19 at age 73; film distributor J. Arthur Rank, Baron Rank (of Sutton Scotney), at Winchester, Hampshire, March 29 at age 83; actor George Sanders by his own hand at Castelldefells, Spain, April 25 at age 65; Bruce Cabot of lung cancer at Woodland Hills, Calif., May 3 at age 67; director Sidney Franklin at Santa Monica May 18 at age 79; Dame Margaret Rutherford at Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, May 22 at age 80; Brandon de Wilde at Blue Hill, Me., July 3 at age 30 of injuries suffered in a traffic accident; Akim Tamiroff at Palm Springs, Calif., September 17 at age 72; Miriam Hopkins after an apparent heart attack at New York October 9 at age 69; actor Leo G. Carroll at Hollywood, Calif., October 16 at age 79; director William Dieterle at Ottobrun, West Germany, December 10 at age 74.

music

Hollywood musicals: Bob Fosse's Cabaret with Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, Helmut Griem; Sidney J. Furie's Lady Sings the Blues (a distorted biography of the late jazz-blues singer Billie Holliday).

Broadway musicals: Sugar 4/9 at the Majestic Theater, with Robert Morse, Cyril Ritchard, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, book from the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, 505 perfs.; Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope 4/19 at the Playhouse, with Micki Grant (née Minnie Perkins McCutcheon), 30, music and lyrics based on ballads, calypso songs, gospel music, direction by Jamaica-born Urban Arts Corps founder Vinnette Carroll, 49, 1,065 perfs.; Grease 6/7 at the Broadhurst Theater (after 128 perfs. at the off-Broadway Martin Eden Theater), with music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs, book by Warren Casey, songs that include "'Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee," "We Go Together," "Alone at a Drive-In Movie," "Shakin' at the High School Hop," 3,388 perfs.; Pippin 10/23 at the Imperial Theater, with Beverly Hills-born actor John Rubinstein, 25, Miami-born actor Benjamin Augustus "Ben" Vereen, 26, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, 1,944 perfs.

Maurice Chevalier dies of a kidney ailment at his native Paris January 1 at age 83; composer Ferde Grofé at Santa Monica April 3 at age 80; baritone Robert Weede at Walnut Creek, Calif., July 9 at age 69; Harry Richman at Hollywood November 3 at age 77; composer Rudolf Friml at Hollywood November 12 at age 90.

Opera: Time Off? Not a Ghost of a Chance! 3/1 at the Sadler's Welles Theatre, London, with music and libretto by Elisabeth Lutyens.

Dancer-choreographer Ted Shawn dies at Orlando, Fla, January 9 at age 80; dancer-choreographer Bronislava Nijinska at Los Angeles February 22 at age 81; organ maker Farny R. Wurlitzer at North Tonawanda, N.Y., May 6 at age 88; soprano Helen Traubel at Santa Monica July 28 at age 73; concert pianist-composer Robert Casadesus after a cancer operation at Paris September 19 at age 73; choreographer Hanya Holm at New York November 3 at age 79; dancer-choreographer José Limon at Flemington, N.J., December 2 at age 64.

Popular songs: "American Pie" by New Rochelle, N.Y.-born singer-songwriter-guitarist Don McLean, 26; "Superfly" by Curtis Mayfield (title song for film); "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by Ewan MacColl; "Simple Song of Freedom" by Bobby Darin; You Don't Mess Around with Jim (album) by Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter-guitarist Jim Croce, 30; "Operator" by Jim Croce; Honky Chateau (album) by Elton John; "I Am Woman" by Helen Reddy; Some Time in New York City (album) by Yoko Ono and John Lennon includes their song "Woman Is the Nigger of the World"; Anticipation (album) by New York-born rock singer-composer Carly Simon, 27; The Divine Miss M (album) by Honolulu-born singer-comedienne Bette Midler, 26; Linda Ronstadt (album) has a Los Angeles backup group (Don Henley, 25; Glenn Frey, 23; Bernie Leadon, 25; Randy Meisner, 26) that will evolve into The Eagles; Will the Circle be Unbroken (album) by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Roy Acuff, now 69; Georgia-born soul singer-songwriter Milly Jackson records "A Child of God" and "Ask Me What You Want."

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson dies at suburban Evergreen Park, Ill., January 27 at age 60; jazz vocalist Jimmy Rushing at New York June 8 at age 68.

sports

Dallas beats Miami 24 to 3 at Miami January 16 in Super Bowl VI. The Dallas Cowboys have been coached since their inception in 1960 by Tom Landry, now 46, who has had winning seasons since 1965 and now wins his first Super Bowl championship, pacing the sidelines in business suit and fedora hat; former Navy quarterback Roger Staubach has played for him since 1969 (after 4 years of service in the navy, including a year in Vietnam), leads the team to victory, and is named Most Valuable Player. The Cowboys introduce the first professional cheerleaders—seven scantily-clad women with full figures who attract far more attention than the high-school girls who previously cavorted at Cowboys games. Texas writer Molly Ivins, now 28, will write in the Progressive, "There's no denying that what those girls do is dress up in costumes that would do credit to a strip-tease artiste and then prance about in front of hundreds of people shaking their bums and jiggling their tits."

Long Island City, N.Y., runner Nina Kuscsik wins the first women's competition in the 76th annual Boston Marathon April 17 in 3 hours, 8 minutes, 58 seconds.

British rower Sylvia Cook, 21, and her companion John Fairfax, 33, arrive at Hayman Island off Australia April 22 with blistered hands after having rowed 8,000 miles across the Pacific from San Francisco in a $5,000 rowboat.

New Hampshire-born endurance swimmer Lynne Cox, 15, crosses the English Channel in 9 hours, 36 minutes—a new world record irrespective of gender.

Yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester dies of pneumonia at Plymouth August 26 at age 70.

University of Kentucky basketball coach Adolph Rupp retires at age 70 after 42 years that have seen Kentucky win 24 Southeastern Conference titles and four National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) titles.

Stan Smith wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Billy Jean King in women's singles; Ilie Nastase, 26, (Romania) wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, King in women's singles.

The Olympic Games at Sapporo, Japan, and Munich attract a record 8,512 athletes from a record 121 countries. Soviet athletes win the most gold medals (gymnast Olga Korbut, 17, wins three plus a silver), Modesto, Calif.-born swimmer Mark Spitz, 22, wins a record seven gold medals, Cuban heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson wins the gold medal in his class (he will win it again in 1976 and 1980), but the games at Munich are marred by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists organized by Mohammed Daoud Mohammed Auda, 35.

The British steeplechase horse Red Rum wins the Grand National at Aintree under the whip of rider Brian Fletcher. The 8-year-old gelding was crippled when owner Noel Le Mare purchased it last year, but Ginger McCain has trained him on sand and in the sea, he sets a record of 9.01 9/10, and he will win again next year at 11-to-1 odds, becoming the first horse to win in successive Grand Nationals (see 1977).

The U.S. Supreme Court refuses June 19 to lift the immunity from antitrust laws granted by Congress to major league baseball in 1922, saying that the matter should be resolved by Congress. The court bypasses a direct ruling on the merits of former St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood's 1969 challenge to the so-called "reserve clause," rejecting his suit in a 5-to-3 ruling (but see 1975).

The Oakland Athletics win the World Series, defeating the Cincinnati Reds 4 games to 2.

Former Brooklyn Dodgers great Jackie Robinson is honored at Cincinnati October 4 at the opening of the World Series to mark the 25th anniversary of his entry into major league baseball but dies suddenly at Stamford, Conn., October 24 at age 53; Pittsburgh Pirates player Roberto Clemente has got his 3,000th hit in the regular season but is killed December 31 at age 38 in the crash of an overloaded DC-10 outside San Juan, Puerto Rico.

everyday life

Bobby Fischer becomes the first American to win the world chess title. Now 29, Chicago-born player Robert James Fischer became the youngest U.S. chess champion at age 15, returned to tournament play 2 years ago after dropping out for a year (he charged that the Federation Internationale des Echecs was letting Soviet players monopolize the matches), and defeats Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky 12½ games to 8½ at Reykjavik, Iceland, in July, winning a record purse of $250,000; the event focuses unprecedented world attention on chess.

Atari (the name is equivalent to check in the Japanese game go) is founded by Utah-born computer-games inventor Nolan Bushnell, 27, and his friend Ted Dabny with an investment of $250 each to manufacture and market "Pong"—the first commercial video-arcade game (see Spacewar, 1962). Beside it is a dark wood cabinet holding a black-and-white cathode-ray screen and the instruction, "Avoid missing ball for high score." Drop in a quarter, the machine "serves" a ball automatically from one side of the screen, a white blip darts about the screen, and the player uses controls to hit the blip with his ball. Bolting a coin box to the outside, Bushnell installs the game in Andy Capp's tavern, a Sunnyvale, Calif., pool bar, in the fall. He takes consulting jobs with electronics firms to raise money, persuades a local bank to give him a $50,000 line of credit, puts together a team of techies who work 12 to 16 hours a day assembling Pong machines (using Motorola TVs) while listening to Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin records, and sells about 10 machines per day, mostly to distributors who handle pinball machines and jukeboxes. He will find a venture capitalist to back him and will sell 6,000 "Pong" games at more than $1,000 each (see 1975).

Magnavox introduces "Odyssey," a video game it has licensed from Sanders Associates, whose supervising engineer Ralph Baer created it in 1966. Played on a 17" RCA color set, the Magnavox version uses Mylar overlays taped to the TV screen to show different game boards or playing fields, it will sell 100,000 in its first year, but Atari's "Pong" is cheaper, it has a sharper picture, and its controls are more sensitive. Some 100,000 "Pong" type games will be sold by 1974, about 10,000 of them by Atari, which will sell $13 million worth of video games, including "Quadropong" for four players and "Puppy Pong," marketed in a Formica doghouse. But the games are easily counterfeited (see "Space Invaders," 1978).

Benny Binion of Binion's Horseshoe at Las Vegas takes over the World Series of Poker started 2 years ago at Reno, increasing antes and blinds to produce a winner in shorter time (see Binion, 1951). Eight players willing to stake an initial $10,000 each participate in the event, which will grow by the end of the century to attract 512 players.

The annual All-American Soap Box Derby at Akron, Ohio, admits girls fo the first time since its founding in 1933. Founder Myron E. Scott, now 65, criticizes the decision, Chevrolet ends its sponsorship, and a nonprofit organization takes over.

Nike Inc. is founded by Portland newspaper publisher's son Philip H. Knight, 33, and his former Oregon University track coach William J. "Bill" Bowerman, 61, who since 1964 have been importing Japanese-made running shoes (see New Balance, 1962). Having coached at Oregon for 24 years, won four NCAA track and field championships, and had 19 Olympians, including distance runner Steve Prefontaine, Bowerman coaches this year's U.S. Olympic track team, but Prefontaine finishes fourth in the 5,000 meters and Bowerman will retire from coaching next year. Knight received his MBA from Stanford in 1962 after producing a business plan for a proposed running-shoe company. Blue Ribbon salesman Jeff Johnson has come up with the name Nike (for the Greek goddess of victory), designer Carolyn Davidson has received $35 for devising the "swoosh" logotype, Bowerman has developed a "waffle sole" and added padding, Knight and Bowerman obtain endorsements from athletes, customers buy 250,000 pairs of Nikes, cheap labor in Korea and Taiwan produces the shoes, and by 1990 Nike will be the world's largest sneaker company, overtaking West Germany's Adidas and making Knight a billionaire as the growing market for athletic shoes attracts dozens of competitors (see Reebok, 1979).

Boston entrepreneur James S. Davis, 28, buys the mail-order running-shoe company New Balance from the Kidd family with backing from his Greek-born father and will soon challenge Nike, Brooks, and other athletic-shoe companies by offering width-sized shoes at premium prices (see 1962).

L'eggs brand hosiery is introduced by the 71-year-old Hanes Corp. of Winston-Salem, N.C., whose management will spin L'eggs off as a separate entity.

Fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga dies at Valencia March 23 at age 77, having retired in 1968 after a long career in which he has helped to popularize the trend toward capes and flowing clothes without waistlines and (more recently) the use of plastic for rainwear; brassiere designer and Maidenform cofounder Ida Rosenthal dies at New York March 28 at age 77; Norman Norell suffers a stroke at his New York apartment in mid-October on the eve of a 50-year retrospective fashion show to be held at the Metropolitan Museum (he has fought throat cancer since 1961), and he dies October 25 at age 72.

The annual All-American Soap Box Derby at Akron, Ohio, admits girls for the first time since its founding in 1933. Founder Myron E. Scott, now 65, criticizes the decision, Chevrolet ends its sponsorship, and a nonprofit organization takes over.

Physical culturist Charles Atlas dies at Long Beach, N.Y., December 23 at age 78.

crime

Reputed Mafia leader Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo is gunned down April 7 during a birthday party at Umberto's Clam House in New York's "Little Italy." Six other men with alleged gangland connections meet with violent deaths in 11 days.

Milan's police commissioner Luigi Calabresi is shot dead on his way to work May 17, beginning an era of political violence as right- and left-wing terrorists wage a war that will take hundreds of lives.

Angela Davis goes on trial for having helped the Soledad brothers shoot their way out of a San Rafael, Calif., courtroom in 1970; an all-white jury at San Jose acquits her June 4.

Capital punishment is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a 5-to-4 decision handed down June 29 in Furman v. Georgia, a case involving a convicted black rapist sentenced to death. The ruling that the death penalty represents "cruel and unusual punishment" spares 600 men and women on death row and brings the United States into line with 37 other countries (in Europe, only France and Spain still have legal execution). The record will show that capital punishment does not deter violent crime, but later Court decisions will permit executions under some circumstances (see 1975).

Reputed Mafia leader Thomas "Tommy Ryan" Eboli is found dead July 10 on a Brooklyn, N.Y. sidewalk. He has been shot five times in the head.

Congress gives unanimous approval to an anti-drug bill, appropriating $80 million to counter the growing menace of heroin abuse (see 1971); focus of the measure is on the demand side, with two-thirds of the money going to treatment programs (the amount will soon be increased to $600 million). Turkey has agreed to stop growing opium poppies, and Mexico has agreed to cooperate in interdiction efforts (see Drug Enforcement Agency, 1973).

The first rape crisis centers open at Ann Arbor, Mich., Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., under the aegis of the National Institute of Justice Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

architecture, real estate

New York's World Trade Center opens its first offices in one of two 110-story towers designed by Troy, Mich., architect Minoru Yamasaki, 58. Soaring 1,368 feet (118 feet higher than the 1,250-foot Empire State Building of 1931), the Trade Center will remain the world's tallest building until 1974. Tenants of offices on lower floors move in even as work continues on the upper floors.

San Francisco's pyramid-shaped Transamerica Corp. building is completed to designs by William L. Pereira Associates. The 48-story tower dominates the city's skyline.

The median sales price of a new one-family U.S. home is $29,700, and 64.4 percent of Americans own their own homes.

environment

Tropical storm Agnes strikes the eastern United States from June 10 to June 20, creating what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Parts of Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York are declared disaster areas as rivers overflow their banks, crippling transportation, destroying crops, buildings, bridges, and roads, isolating communities, forcing thousands to flee their homes, and killing 134.

The Susquehanna River breaks through its dikes June 23, flooding the Wyoming Valley and creating havoc in the Wilkes-Barre area.

The San Diego Zoological Society opens a Wild Animal Park on a 1,800-acre site in the San Pasqual Valley northeast of the city (see zoo, 1916). A five-mile monorail system allows visitors to observe various habitat groups from regions as diverse as Asia, East Africa, South Africa, and Australia.

Amendments to the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act (Clean Water) signed into law by President Nixon October 18 sets a 1977 deadline for the installation of the "best practicable" pollution control equipment for treating fluid waste discharges and sets a 1983 deadline for the installation of the "best available" equipment. Designed to make the nation's rivers and streams safe for fishing and swimming, the new legislation has been passed in response to growing indignation at polluters, who now find it illegal to discharge material into navigable waterways without a permit. Congress appropriates $18 billion for assistance grants to help municipalities build sewage treatment facilities, but the massive correction action has the handicap of statutory ambiguities that must be resolved in the courts.

An earthquake rocks southern Iran April 10. Registering 7.1 on the Richter scale, it levels 45 villages within a 250-mile radius and kill 5,054; a quake measuring 6.2 rocks Managua, Nicaragua, December 23, killing 5,000. The government cuts off food supplies to the city December 25 in an effort to force survivors to leave before decaying bodies beneath the rubble can produce an epidemic.

El Niño—a warming of ocean currents off the west coast of South America—drives away the anchovies used for the fishmeal that goes into animal feeds. The anchovy shortage drives up prices of alternative protein sources, notably soybeans and soybean meal.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act signed into law by President Nixon October 22 bans killing of polar bears except by Alaskan natives and forbids imports of tuna caught in nets that encircle dolphins swimming together with tuna in parts of the Pacific. Such nets have been suffocating as many as 500,000 dolphins per year, and while the legislation will sharply reduce the toll by U.S. fishermen the numbers killed by foreign boats will increase dramatically (see 1989).

William Ruckelshaus of the new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announces an almost total ban on domestic use of DDT by December 31 after the insecticide has been shown to cause cancer in test animals. It is clearly being stored in fatty tissues, and although scientists disagree on DDT's long-term effects there is good evidence that it is reducing bird populations by causing females to lay eggs with thinner shells. Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz and former Secretary Clifford M. Hardin have warned that restrictions on pesticides such as DDT will have a catastrophic impact on farmers.

agriculture

The worst drought since 1963 withers Soviet and Chinese grain crops, forcing Moscow either to import grain or reduce livestock herds and thus risk the political consequences of reduced meat supplies (see Poland, 1970). Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz visited the Crimea in April and suggested to the Soviet minister of agriculture Vladimir V. Matskevich that the Ukraine's rich black soil be irrigated, but the Soviet budget has allocated few rubles for agricultural progress.

Soviet grain buyers arrive at New York in late June, find U.S. wheat for July delivery selling at $1.40 per bushel, and place orders. Continental Grain receives assurance from an assistant U.S. secretary of agriculture that the USDA will pay export subsidies to maintain the export price of U.S. wheat at $1.63 per bushel ($60 per metric ton), Moscow's buyers begin signing contracts, first with Continental, then with Cargill and others. In 6 weeks they buy a million tons of soybeans, several million tons of corn, and 20 million tons of wheat—more than half of it U.S. wheat, one fourth of the entire U.S. wheat crop.

Black sigatoka fungus appears in Honduran banana fields and begins to spread throughout Central America, attacking leaves and preventing photosynthesis. By 1979 it will be in Africa, threatening famine.

consumer protection

Consumers Union founder Arthur Kallet dies of viral pneumonia at New Rochelle, N.Y., February 24 at age 69.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues a warning in April against the "food supplement" L-tryptophan, bans sales of pills containing the isolated amino acid pending a long federal safety review, but makes few efforts to enforce the ban that health-food manufacturers simply ignore. Used by many to treat insomnia and premenstrual syndrome, L-tryptophan has been on the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list for years, but recent studies have linked intake of isolated amino acids to growth retardation, degeneration of certain organs, and bladder cancer in laboratory rats. L-tryptophan is inadvertently allowed to remain on the GRAS list (see 1989).

Eater's Digest: The Consumer's Fact Book of Food Additives by Michael F. Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest raises more questions about food safety (see 1971).

food and drink

Quaker Oats introduces Quaker 100% Natural cereal—the first mainstream granola breakfast-food product (the Center for Science in the Public Interest will blast 100% Natural as having nearly four grams of saturated fat per half-cup serving, even more than a McDonald hamburger). Heartland Natural Cereal is introduced by Pet Incorporated (formerly Pet Milk Co.). Kellogg prepares to introduce Country Morning, and General Mills will follow suit with its own heavily sugared version of Granola, made by Lassen Foods of Chico, Calif.

Nissin Foods (USA) introduces Top Ramen, a bag-type product containing fried noodles with a soup packet (see Oodles of Noodles, 1976). The company opens a production facility, one of the first major Japanese facilities in the United States.

Steve's Homemade Ice Cream has its beginnings in a Somerville, Mass., scoop shop opened by entrepreneur Steven Herrell, who will sell his superpremium ice cream business in 1977 for $80,000 (see Häagen-Dazs, 1959; Ben & Jerry's, 1978).

Snapple Fruit Juices are introduced at New York by Unadulterated Food Products (it will be renamed Snapple Beverage Co.), started by local entrepreneurs Hyman Golden and Leonard Marsh, both 40, in partnership with Arnold Greenberg, 50, who has been operating a health-food store in St. Marks Place (Golden and Marsh, brothers-in-law, have had a window-washing business). The company will grow in the next 20 years to have 26 plants bottling nearly 60 all-natural Snapple varieties, carbonated and noncarbonated, many containing 100 percent real fruit juice, for distribution nationwide (see iced tea, 1987).

restaurants

President Nixon evades charges that he accepted a campaign contribution of more than $200,000 from McDonald's chairman Ray Kroc and has reciprocated by opposing any increase in the minimum wage. McDonald's makes extensive use of teenage labor in its operations. Kroc has established Hamburger University at Elk Grove, Ill. Students learn how to clean grills, how to flip hamburgers, and how to know when a hamburger is done (when it turns brown around the edges), and receive the Bachelor of Hamburgerology with a minor in french fries.

McDonald's opens 368 new restaurants and introduces the Egg McMuffin, created by Herb Peterson. It will be served throughout the chain by 1976, making McDonald's the first major fast-food chain to offer breakfast items (see 1971; Chicken McNuggets, 1980).

The Popeyes fast-food chain has its beginnings in the Chicken on the Run restaurant opened in a New Orleans suburb by entrepreneur Alvin C. "Al" Copeland, who initially sells traditional mild fried chicken to the downtown luncheon crowd, finds it hard going, and experiments with spicier Cajun recipes. Renaming the place after the character Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle played by Gene Hackman in the 1971 film The French Connection, Copeland soon has customers lining up for his New Orleans-style fried chicken; by 2005 the chain will have 1,118 restaurants in the United States and 27 foreign countries.

population

A Massachusetts law prohibiting sale or dispensing of contraceptives to unmarried persons is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court rules March 22 in a 6-to-1 decision (Eisenstadt v. Baird) that overturns similar laws in 26 other states.

The National Center for Health Statistics reports May 23 that the U.S. birthrate has fallen to 15.8 per 1,000—the lowest since the survey began in 1917.

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

Archaeology

Pierre Amiet is the first to connect clay envelopes filled with stones or fired clay objects (later called tokens) with the development of numeration. See also 1970 Archaeology.

A Soviet spacecraft, Venera 8, soft-lands on Venus.

On March 2 the United States launches Pioneer 10, the first space probe to study Jupiter. On June 13, 1983, it is the first probe to leave the solar system.

U.S. astronauts make two more visits to the Moon and return with lunar rocks for further analysis. See also 1972 Transportation.

Paul Berg [b. New York City, June 30, 1926] inserts a human gene into the DNA of a bacterium, producing the first recombinant DNA molecule. See also 1970 Biology; 1973 Biology.

Stephen Jay Gould [b. New York City, September 10, 1941, d. New York, May 20, 2002] and American Niles Eldredge [b. 1943] publish their theory of punctuated equilibrium, stating that evolution often occurs in short bursts followed by long periods of equilibrium. See also 1894 Biology.

The California State Board of Education demands that the Biblical account of Creation receive equal attention in textbooks as Darwinian theory. See also 1859 Biology.

Andrew Wylie and coworkers coin the word apoptosis to describe programmed cell death, a built-in method of destroying cells after they are no longer useful in development. See also 2002 Biology.

Gerald M. Edelman and Rodney Robert Porter win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the determination of the chemical structure of antibodies. See also 1959 Biology; 1962 Biology.

Americans Dudley R. Herschbach [b. San Jose, California, June 18, 1932] and Yuan T. Lee [b. Hsinchu, Taiwan, November 19, 1936] develop a "supermachine" for the crossed-beam molecular technique. It employs strong differential pumping, sophisticated mass spectroscopy using ion counting techniques adapted from nuclear physics, and supersonic beam sources with the goal of interpreting reaction dynamics in terms of electron structure. See also 1986 Chemistry.

Christian Anfinsen, Stanford Moore, and William H. Stein share the Nobel Prize for chemistry for their pioneering research in enzyme chemistry. See also 1959 Chemistry.

Lexitron puts the first word processing system on the market. VYDEC Corporation introduces a word processing system that is immediately more successful. Wang Laboratories introduces a word processing system using the IBM Selectric typewriter as a printer. Text in the Wang system is stored on magnetic tape. See also 1964 Communication; 1978 Communication.

Threshold Technologies introduces the first speech-recognition system, the VIP 100. A computer can recognize a limited number of words when each word is pronounced separately. See also 1973 Communication.

Lawrence Roberts at the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Techniques Office writes the program RD, the first e-mail manager to include a filing system and a delete function. See also 1971 Communication.

Odyssey, the first home video game, developed by Ralph Baer [b. Germany, 1922] is introduced by Magnavox. Nolan Bushnell founds Atari and, with employee Al Acorn, invents Pong, a video game with a liquid crystal screen that is an immediate success, grossing $11,000,000 in 1973. Players use electronic paddles to push a glowing dot back and forth. Atari will later start producing one of the earliest successful personal computers. See also 1955 Communication; 1985 Communication.

Philips Corporation of the Netherlands introduces a disk-laser recording system they call Laservision. See also 1965 Communication; 1981 Communication.

Alan Kay introduces SMALLTALK, a computer language derived from Simula, especially adapted for graphics, including windows and icons. It is one of the first object-oriented languages. See also 1970 Communication; 1973 Computers.

Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson [b. New Orleans, 1943] at ITT Bell Labs develop "C," a computer language running under the UNIX operating system. They use it to rewrite UNIX, replacing the original assembly language version of UNIX in 1977. Later versions, such as C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup [b. Aarhus, Denmark, 1950] become highly successful and will be widely used for writing software packages throughout the remainder of the century. See also 1971 Communication.

Alain Colmeraurer in France develops PROLOG (PROgramming LOGic), a computer language developed for applications in artificial intelligence. See also 1959 Communication.

Telenet Communications Corporation establishes a time-sharing computer network with terminals all over the world. TYMNET also establishes a communications network. See also 1969 Computers.

The World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City, is completed in January. The two towers are 417 m (1368 ft) and 415 m (1362 ft) high, surpassing the Empire State Building, also of Manhattan, in height. Both of its twin towers will be totally destroyed by a terrorist attack using two hijacked passenger airplanes on September 11, 2001. See also 1931 Construction; 2001 Construction.

W. Jason Morgan of Princeton University extends the idea that the Hawaiian Islands were formed as the Pacific plate moved over a "hot spot," where a plume of magma rises from the mantle, to include the Emperor Seamounts, a group of underwater volcanoes to the northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. See also 1963 Earth science.

The United States launches Landsat I, the first Earth-resources satellite, on July 23. It uses a television camera and a multispectrum scanner, which captures images at various wavelengths of light, to broadcast to Earth images that can show such information as forest and mineral resources.

The Club of Rome publishes its report, The Limits to Growth, also known as the Meadows Report, announcing that Earth will face environmental disasters if the trends of pollution and depletion of Earth's resources continue. See also 1970 Ecology & the environment; 1973 Ecology & the environment.

In June the United Nations Conference on Human Environment meets in Stockholm, Sweden, to examine global environmental issues. See also 1970 Ecology & the environment.

In the United States, the use of DDT is restricted to protect the environment and wildlife, especially birds, whose eggshells are dangerously thinned, lowering the birds' reproductive rate. Interstate sales of DDT are banned. See also 1939 Food & agriculture.

The U.S. Congress passes a number of laws to protect the environment. It establishes the National Marine Sanctuary Program to create sanctuaries for ecological, scientific, and recreational purposes. The Ocean Dumping Act bans dumping of radiological, chemical, and biological warfare agents and high-level radioactive wastes. A revised Clean Air Act allocates $95,000,000 to local, state, and national air pollution control efforts. See also 1963 Ecology & the environment.

Intel develops the first eight-bit microprocessor chip, the 8008; it will be used in the MARK-8 "personal minicomputer" and other home computer kits in 1974. See also 1971 Computers; 1974 Electronics.

In Germany, an experimental power station uses coal that is converted to gas before being burned to produce electric power. See also 1985 Energy.

René Thom publishes Stabilité structurelle et morphogenése ("structural stability and change"), which describes catastrophe theory. See also 1968 Mathematics.

In the United Kingdom, the first experimental computerized axial tomography (CAT scan, later known as CT scan) imager for medical purposes, the head scanner EMI Mark 1 developed by Godfrey Hounsfield, is introduced at Atkinson Morley's Hospital in Wimbledon. It takes 4.5 minutes to gather data followed by 20 minutes of computer time to construct an image. It detects a brain tumor in a living patient on October 4. See also 1967 Medicine & health.

Jean François Borel [b. Switzerland, 1933] discovers the immunosuppressant cyclosporine, which helps prevent rejection of organ transplants. It will be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1983. See also 1957 Medicine & health.

David S. Janowsky and coworkers determine that bipolar disorder, commonly called manic depression, is caused by an imbalance between two types of neurotransmitters, the adrenergic and cholinergic.

In September Murray Gell-Mann presents the beginnings of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that links quarks and color forces, along with three different flavors of quarks -- up and down, strange and charm, and bottom and top. See also 1965 Physics; 1979 Physics.

Boris Ya. Zel'dovich and coworkers use the phenomenon of stimulated Brillouin scattering to create a beam of time-reversed light; such a beam can be transmitted through a distorting medium and be concentrated instead of distorted. See also 1964 Physics.

John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Bob Schrieffer of the United States win the Nobel Prize in physics for their theory of superconductivity without electrical resistance at a temperature of absolute zero. See also 1957 Physics.

The large accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, begins operations at 200 GeV (giga electron volts, or 200,000,000,000 electron volts) and reaches 400 GeV later in the year. See also 1983 Tools.

U.S. astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly II, and Charles M. Duke are launched on April 16 to start the Apollo 16 mission; they complete the fifth lunar landing, are the second to carry an LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle), spend 18 hours 14 minutes in EVA, and return 213 pounds of material. Eugene Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison Schmitt begin the Apollo 17 mission on December 7. They complete the last manned lunar landing, the third with an LRV, have a total EVA time of 44 hours 8 minutes, and return 243 pounds of material. This is the last of the Apollo missions and the last attempt to send people to the Moon to date.

Drama and Theater

• Frank Chin (b. 1940): The Chickencoop Chinaman. The first play by an Asian American playwright to be produced on a mainstream New York stage is Chin's debut, about an Asian American loner's search for a sustaining heritage and identity.
• Paul Carter Harrison (b. 1936): The Great MacDaddy. The winner of the Obie Award for best off-Broadway play concerns the spiritual quest of the title character, set in Depression-era America, an environment inhospitable to African Americans. Considered Harrison's masterpiece, the play combines African American folklore and street talk with African music and myth. Harrison is a professor of theater and African American literature and the author of The Drama of Nommo: Black Theater in the African Continuum (1974).
• Jim Jacobs (b. 1942) and Warren Casey (1935-1988): Grease. This musical, exploiting the popular nostalgic craze for 1950s popular culture, becomes for a time the longest-running show on Broadway, with 3,388 performances. Jacobs is a Chicago-born actor; Casey, born in New York City, appeared in local productions before Grease. He would originate the role of Bernie Litko in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974).
• David Mamet (b. 1947): Duck Variations. The Chicago playwright gains his first attention for this play about two old men who are sitting on a park bench and musing about their lives and the habits of ducks. The play showcases Mamet's characteristic sparse plot and convincing dialogue.
• Arthur Miller: The Creation of the World and Other Business. Miller's dramatic treatment of the Book of Genesis fails with both critics and audiences and closes quickly.
• Jason Miller (1939-2001): That Championship Season. The actor-playwright's only Broadway success depicts the reunion of members of a former championship basketball team with their old coach. The former triumph is contextualized by the characters' current failings.
• Sam Shepard: The Tooth of Crime. Regarded by many as Shepard's best play, the drama takes the form of a duel between competing rock stars, reflecting contemporary American values and myths.
• Neil Simon: The Sunshine Boys. Simon revives the themes of The Odd Couple in the relationship of two retired vaudeville performers who try to set aside their differences for a reunion performance. The play would be followed by two failures, The Good Doctor (1973), an adaptation of short stories by Anton Chekhov, and God's Favorite (1976), a retelling of the Job story.
• Joseph A. Walker (1935-2003): The River Niger. This production by the Negro Ensemble Company deals with a black house-painter and failed poet who tries to make sense of his life. It would reach Broadway in 1973 and win the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Tony Award for best play.

Fiction

• Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935-?): The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. Acosta, who is depicted as "Dr. Gonzo" in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, offers a fictionalized version of his autobiography as a Chicano's odyssey of self-discovery. A sequel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, would appear in 1973; the next year Acosta disappeared in Mexico.
• Rudolfo Anaya (b. 1937): Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya's first novel, and the first of his New Mexico trilogy, chronicles how the atomic blast at White Sands, New Mexico, affects a Mexican American, who tries to forge a new identity from Spanish, Indian, and Anglo elements. The book establishes Anaya as a leading Chicano writer. Anaya was born in New Mexico and taught in the Albuquerque public schools, at the University of Albuquerque, and at the University of New Mexico.
• Richard Bach (b. 1936): Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Bach's inspirational fable about a seagull who discovers the joy of flight becomes a surprising bestseller, eclipsing the hardcover record set by Gone with the Wind, with more than three million copies sold. Bach had worked as a charter pilot and barnstormer throughout the Midwest.
• Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995): Gorilla, My Love. Following her editing one of the first important anthologies of black women writers, The Black Woman (1970), Bambara produces her best-known work, a story collection called by one reviewer "among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time."
• John Barth: Chimera. Barth's short fiction collection revisits well-known tales such as those of the legendary storyteller Scheherazade while reflexively addressing the composition difficulties of the author--Barth himself--thus making the act of writing a part of the volume's theme. It wins the National Book Award.
• Don De Lillo: End Zone. De Lillo gains his first major critical attention in this second novel, which conflates football and nuclear warfare in the experiences of a West Texas college running back. It would be followed by Great Jones Street (1973), an exploration of the rock 'n' roll and drug culture.
• John Gardner: The Sunlight Dialogues. Gardner's philosophical novel, set in his native Batavia, New York, pits the concept of freedom, represented by a free-spirited magician, against law and order, represented by the town's police chief.
• Barry Hannah (b. 1942): Geronimo Rex. The first novel by the Mississippi-born writer depicts the picaresque adventures of an aspiring writer who draws inspiration from the Apache warrior. A sequel, Nightwatchman, would follow in 1973.
• John Hersey: The Conspiracy. Hersey's epistolary historical novel dramatizes the plot in a.d. 64 to kill Emperor Nero, drawing correspondences between political corruption and civil liberty in ancient Rome and the contemporary scene.
• Ira Levin: The Stepford Wives. Levin adapts issues from the women's movement into a best-selling thriller in which suburban women are modified as automatons to serve their husbands.
• Steven Millhauser (b. 1943): Edwin Mulhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. Millhauser's inventive first novel treats the eleven-year life of a precocious writer, recounted by his best friend. As one reviewer observes, "It is at once a satire of literary biography, an evocation of childhood and an exploration of the creative mind". Millhauser would continue his examination of childhood with Portrait of a Romantic (1977), an autobiography of the narrator's life from age eleven to fifteen.
• Vladimir Nabokov: Transparent Things. Nabokov's novella, dealing with Hugh Person's memories of several visits to Switzerland, serves as the writer's valediction, his final important meditation on the relationship between experience and the imagination and the persistence of memory.
• James Purdy: I Am Elijah Thrush. This exotic fable treats the pursuit of freedom and artistic independence in a series of surrealistic and allegorical scenes and characterizations.
• Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo. Reed's novel, set in New Orleans in the 1920s, is a different kind of African American detective novel, combining diverse elements such as film noir, jazz, and the occult in a kind of "gumbo," or cross-cultural mélange, appropriate to the Crescent City. A sequel, Last Days of Louisiana Red, would follow in 1974.
• Philip Roth: The Breast. Roth constructs a Kafka-like fable in which an academic awakes to find that he has metamorphosed into a giant female breast. Roth would bring this character back in The Professor of Desire (1977).
• Alix Kates Shulman (b. 1932): Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Regarded as the first important novel to come out of the women's movement, this work tells the coming-of-age story of a white middle-class girl in the Midwest during the 1950s. A bestseller, the novel is nominated for the National Book Award. Shulman's next novel, Burning Questions (1978), deals with the formative years of the modern women's movement and the changes it produced in women's lives. Shulman was born in Cleveland. Her subsequent novels are Burning Questions (1978), On the Stroll (1981), In Every Woman's Life... (1987), and Drinking the Rain (1995).
• John Updike: Museums and Women. Several of the stories in this collection deal with the Maples, Updike's representative distressed American family. As one reviewer observes, "There is not a writer around today who is better able to capture people, their marriages, children, affairs--really their lives--and wry emotion from what others consider sterile suburbia".
• Eudora Welty: The Optimist's Daughter. Welty's novel follows a young professional woman's attempt to reinterpret her parents' marriage. It is Welty's most autobiographical work and considered her best by reviewer Howard Moss, a "long goodbye in a very short space not only to the dead but to delusion and to sentiment as well."
• Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (b. 1939): The Flame and the Flower. Woodiwiss's first novel is generally credited with creating the genre known as the erotic historical romance, featuring detailed sexual content. The novel would go through more than eighty printings and sell more than four million copies. A sequel, The Elusive Flame, would appear in 1998.
• Helen Yglesias (b. 1915): How She Died. The author's first novel focuses on Mary Moody Schwartz, daughter of a Communist convicted of spying for the Soviets in the 1930s. Critics praise the author for rendering the history of American radicalism with imaginative specificity and passion that is remarkably free of cliché. She would follow it with the novel Family Feeling (1976) and the memoir Starting: Early, Anew, Over, and Late (1978), describing her decision to leave her position as literary editor of the Nation and pursue a writing career.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Howard Nemerov: Reflections on Poetry and Poetics. Nemerov provides technical analysis of the poetical works of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Dickey, and others, as well as reflections on the critical process and the state of modern poetry.
• Peter Prescott (b. 1935): Soundings: Encounters with Contemporary Books. In a selection of his reviews for Look, Newsweek, and other magazines, Prescott not only evaluates works by significant writers such as Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates, but he also examines the role of the book critic in a way that other reviewers find shrewd and practical. Prescott was a book editor and has been the book critic for Newsweek since 1971.
• Lionel Trilling: Sincerity and Authenticity. The collection of lectures Trilling had delivered at Harvard form, according to reviewer Anatole Broyard, "a brilliant study of our moral life in process of revising itself." The lectures address the evolution of literature and society, from the sincerity that dominated the work of writers until the Romantic era, when the conception of selfhood began to emphasize authenticity.
• Sherley Anne Williams (1944-1999): Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study of Neo-Black Literature. This groundbreaking work places the black aesthetic writers of the 1960s squarely in the context of African American folk culture. For Williams, such writers are heroes whose work dignifies the black experience. A poet and novelist, Williams grew up in Fresno, California. Her other books would include The Peacock Poems (1975), Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), and Dessa Rose (1986).

Nonfiction

• Sydney E. Ahlstrom (1919-1984): A Religious History of the American People. Christian Century magazine in 1979 would declare this National Book Award-winning study by the professor of religious history at Yale the most outstanding book on religion published during the 1970s.
• James Baldwin: No Name in the Street. This work collects autobiographical fragments and statements on the author's positions on racial matters, along with a recollection of Martin Luther King Jr. In it Baldwin states that "as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people of any color, to be found in the world today."
• Gwendolyn Brooks: Report from Part One. Brooks provides an autobiographical account of her background, her personal and family history, and the evolution of her political and racial consciousness.
• Frances FitzGerald (b. 1940): Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam. The journalist wins the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for this essay collection, exploring American involvement in Vietnam from the perspective of the South Vietnamese people and demonstrating how Vietnamese traditions conflict with American notions of progress and technology. Fitzgerald's subsequent books would be American Revised (1979), Cities on a Hill (1986), and Way Out There in the Blue (2000).
• James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003): George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799. Flexner, a biographer and art historian, wins the National Book Award and receives a special Pulitzer Prize citation for his final volume of what is generally considered the definitive biography of George Washington. Earlier volumes are The Forge of Experience (1965), George Washington in the American Revolution (1968), and George Washington and the New Nation (1970). The entire series has been described by critic John L. Gignilliat as "one of the monumental American biographies."
• John Lewis Gaddis (b. 1941): The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947. Gaddis, a history professor at Ohio University, establishes his reputation as the leading authority on the Cold War with this Bancroft Prize-winning study. The first and most influential of the so-called postrevisionist studies of American-Soviet relations, it attempts an impartial assessment.
• David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam's National Book Award-nominated work about America's entry into the Vietnam War is a bestseller. Its title contributes a catchphrase to the national debate about this controversial conflict.
• Louis R. Harlan (b. 1922): Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901. Harlan, a history professor at the University of Maryland, wins the Bancroft Prize for the first of his two-volume definitive biography. The second volume, The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (1983), would also earn the Bancroft Prize as well as the Pulitzer Prize.
• Norman Mailer: Existential Errands. Mailer collects a miscellany of essays, speeches, letters, a one-act play, and translations. He also publishes St. George and the Godfather, his reporting on the 1972 presidential conventions.
• Robert Manson Myers (b. 1921): The Children of Pride. Myers, an English professor at the University of Maryland, receives the National Book Award for this collection of letters from a prominent Georgia family written between 1854 and 1868. Reviewer Reynolds Price calls it "the best book known to me which is concerned with the daily lives and minds of upper- and middle-class white Southerners during the war." Additional volumes would appear in 1977 and 1978; Myers would adapt the letters to form several dramas, published as Quintet: A Five-Play Cycle Drawn from The Children of Pride (1991).
• W. A. Swanberg (1907-1992): Luce and His Empire. Swanberg's biography of Henry R. Luce, cofounder of Time, Inc., wins the Pulitzer Prize. It is one of the Minnesota-born freelance writer's several biographical studies of American tycoons, including Jim Fisk (1959), Citizen Hearst (1961), and Pulitzer (1967). Swanberg would win the National Book Award for his final biography, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (1976).
• Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1937): Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson displays his irreverent brand of "Gonzo journalism" in this account of a drug-filled tour of Las Vegas. Thompson would later describe the book as "a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties," while Tom Wolfe ranked it as the "Best Book of the Dope Decade." Thompson's follow-up is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), and his magazine articles are collected in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979).
• Barbara Tuchman: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945. Tuchman wins her second Pulitzer Prize for this historical study treating American relations with China and its emergence as a modern country. She publishes additional reflections on China in Notes from China.

Poetry

• A. R. Ammons: Collected Poems 1951-1971. This National Book Award-winning collection brings together works from Ammons's first six volumes as well as new works, including the long poems "Extreme Moderations," "Hibernaculum," and "Essay on Poetics."
• John Ashbery: Three Poems. Considered by many a turning point in Ashbery's career, the collection shows him abandoning the verse line for long prose paragraphs, attempting to revitalize ordinary language while establishing the poet's philosophy of life and writing.
• Nikki Giovanni: My House. The collection marks a transition to more personal subjects and a more lyrical, introspective method. Divided into two sections--"The Rooms Inside" and "The Rooms Outside"--the arrangement suggests a dialogue between two sides of the poet's nature. Giovanni's next collection, The Women and the Men (1975), shows a similar method and concerns.
• Maxine Kumin: Up Country. Kumin's collection of unsentimental meditations and observations about her life in rural New England wins the Pulitzer Prize. The collection invites comparisons with Thoreau, but as Joyce Carol Oates has observed, Kumin's work provides "a sharp-edged, unflinching and occasionally nightmarish subjectivity exasperatingly absent in Thoreau."
• Denise Levertov: Footprints. The first in a series of collections, followed by The Freeing of the Dust (1975) and Life in the Forest (1978), that shows the modulation of the poet's public stances into explorations of private thoughts and experiences.
• Philip Levine: They Feed the Lion. This collection establishes Levine as one of the major American poets and links him with Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams in celebrating common humanity. It includes the admired sequence "Thistles."
• James Merrill: Braving the Elements. Merrill earns the Bollingen Prize for this collection thematically linked by different survival responses to existential, natural, and interpersonal crises in works such as "After the Fire" and "Days of 1935."
• Anne Sexton: The Book of Folly. The collection marks a return to the confessional mode in works such as "The Death of the Fathers" and "Angels of the Love Affair." Included as well is the sequence "The Jesus Papers," anticipating the religious themes that would dominate Sexton's final collections.

Publications and Events

• Anne SextonThe American Indian Theatre Ensemble. The first all-Indian repertory company (later renamed the Native American Theatre Ensemble) is founded by Hanay Geiogamah (b. 1945). Its first production is Geiogamah's drama Body Indian.
• Anne SextonMs. Cofounded by Gloria Steinem (b. 1934) to celebrate the women's movement and provide a forum for women's issues ignored by mainstream periodicals, Ms. first appears as a preview supplement in New York magazine in December 1971. Its first issue of 300,000 copies sells out in eight days. Ms. helped introduce to a wide readership writers such as Alice Walker, Erica Jong, and Mary Gordon while helping to set the agenda for women's concerns during the period.