1968

Decades: 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s - 1960s - 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

Years: 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 - 1968 - 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973

• January 2 - Dr. Christian Barnard performs the first successful heart transplant[?].
• January 5 - "Prague Spring" begins in Czechoslovakia
• January 23 - North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo[?], claiming the ship violated their territorial waters while spying.
• January 30 - Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begin when Viet Cong forces launch series of a surprise attacks in South Vietnam.
• January 31 - Viet Cong attack the United States embassy in Saigon
• January 31 - Nauru declares independence from Australia
• February 1 - Vietnam War: A Viet Cong officer is executed by Nguyen Ngoc Loan[?] a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The execution was videotaped and photographed and helped sway public opinion against the war.
• February 8 - American civil rights movement: A civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley[?] in Orangeburg, South Carolina is broken-up by highway patrolmen leading to the deaths of three college students.
• February 11 - Peggy Fleming[?] wins Olympics figure skating gold medal, Grenoble, France[?].
• February 11 - Israeli-Jordan border clashes.
• February 11 - Madison Square Garden III closes, Madison Square Garden IV opens in New York.
• February 16 - In Haleyville, Alabama the first 9-1-1 emergency telephone system goes into service.
• February 17 - In Springfield, Massachusetts the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame opens.
• February 24 - Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive is halted - South Vietnam recaptures Hué
• March 7 - Vietnam War: The First Battle of Saigon[?] begins.
• March 12 - Mauritius achieves independence from British Rule.
• March 16 - Vietnam War: My Lai massacre American troops kills scores of women and children.
• March 18 - Gold standard: The United States Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
• March 31 - American President Lyndon Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.
• April 3 - Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "mountaintop" speech.
• April 4 - Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.
• April 20 - Pierre Elliott Trudeau becomes Canada's fifteenth prime minister.
• April 23-April 30 - Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
• May - Uprising in Paris, France, nearly brings down the government
• May 22 - The nuclear-powered submarine the USS Scorpion[?] sinks with 99 men aboard 400 miles southwest of the Azores.
• June 5 - Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, California.
• August 21 - Warsaw Pact nations invade Czechoslovakia
• August 22-August 30 - Police clash with antiwar protesters in Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention
• November - Richard M. Nixon defeats Hubert H. Humphrey in the U.S. presidential election
• Booker Prize for Fiction is established by Booker plc.
• 1968 is known as the year of the Prague Spring and also the year of the Paris riots[?].
• The ASCII character code is standardized as ANSI Standard X3.4.
• December 27 - The long-running radio program The Breakfast Club[?] signs off for the last time (ABC radio).

Art, Culture & Fashion

• 1968 in film
  • Oliver!
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick
  • The Green Berets starring John Wayne
  • Once Upon a time in the West[?], directed by Sergio Leone
• 1968 in literature
• 1968 in music
• 1968 in sports
• 1968 in television
  • January 22 - Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, debuts on NBC.
  • October 14 - First live network transmission of video from inside a manned U.S. space capsule in orbit ("Apollo 7") There were six such broadcasts during their eleven-day mission.
  • CBS uses a portable minicam for political convention coverage.
  • Nearly 200 million households now own television sets, (78 million of which are in the U.S.).
  • Hawaii Five-O premieres

Births:

• January 6 - John Singleton, director and writer
• January 14 - LL Cool J, rapper, actor
• January 24 - Mary Lou Retton, gymnast
• January 28 - Sarah McLachlan, singer
• January 29 - Edward Burns[?], actor
• February 1 - Lisa Marie Presley, actress
• February 8 - Gary Coleman, actor
• February 27 - Matt Stairs, professional baseball player
• March 4 - Patsy Kensit[?], actress
• March 11 - Lisa Loeb[?], singer
• March 29 - Lucy Lawless[?], actress, singer
• March 30 - Céline Dion, singer
• April 3 - Sebastian Bach[?], musician ("Skid Row")
• May 7 - Traci Lords, erotic actress
• May 9 - Marie-José Perec, French athlete
• May 26 - Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark[?]
• May 28 - Kylie Minogue, actress and singer
• October 7 - Toni Braxton[?], singer
• November 12 - Sammy Sosa, baseball player
• November 15 - Jennifer Charles[?], singer

• January 22- Duke Kahanamoku, American swimmer.
• February 4 - Neal Cassady, writer
• February 11 - Howard Lindsay[?], United States playwright.
• February 20 - Anthony Asquith[?], director, writer
• February 22 - Peter Arno[?], cartoonist
• February 27 - Frankie Lymon, singer
• March 27 - Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit the earth
• April 1 - Lev Davidovich Landau, Russian physicist
• April 4 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist, minister
• April 7 - Jimmy Clark, racing driver
• June 1 - Helen Keller
• November 26 - Arnold Zweig, German writer (* 1887)
• December 12 - Tallulah Bankhead, American actress
• December 20 - John Steinbeck, American writer
• December 30 - Trygve Lie, the first United Nations Secretary General

Nobel Prizes:

• Physics - Luis Walter Alvarez[?]
• Chemistry - Lars Onsager
• Medicine - Robert W Holley[?], Har Gobind Khorana[?], Marshall W Nirenberg[?]
• Literature - Yasunari Kawabata[?]
• Peace - René Cassin[?]