Important Historical Events of the year 1968, Year 1968 in History

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List of 1968 Major News Events in History, Most Important Historical Events in 1968

What happened in the year 1968?

Date	Event
January 5, 1968	Alexander Dubček comes to power in Czechoslovakia, effectively beginning the "Prague Spring".
January 7, 1968	Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
January 13, 1968	Johnny Cash performs live at Folsom State Prison.
January 21, 1968	Vietnam War: Battle of Khe Sanh: One of the most publicized and controversial battles of the war begins.
January 21, 1968	A B-52 bomber crashes near Thule Air Base, contaminating the area after its nuclear payload ruptures. One of the four bombs remains unaccounted for after the cleanup operation is complete.
January 22, 1968	Apollo 5 lifts off carrying the first Lunar module into space.
January 22, 1968	Operation Igloo White, a US electronic surveillance system to stop communist infiltration into South Vietnam begins installation.
January 23, 1968	USS Pueblo (AGER-2) is attacked and seized by the Korean People's Navy.
January 24, 1968	Vietnam War: The 1st Australian Task Force launches Operation Coburg against the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong during wider fighting around Long Bình and Biên Hòa.
January 30, 1968	Vietnam War: Tet Offensive launch by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army against South Vietnam, the United States, and their allies.
January 31, 1968	Vietnam War: Viet Cong guerrillas attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
January 31, 1968	Nauru gains independence from Australia.
February 1, 1968	Vietnam War: The execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan is recorded on motion picture film, as well as in an iconic still photograph taken by Eddie Adams.
February 1, 1968	Canada's three military services, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, are unified into the Canadian Forces.
February 1, 1968	The New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad are merged to form Penn Central Transportation.
February 8, 1968	American civil rights movement: The Orangeburg massacre: An attack on black students from South Carolina State University who are protesting racial segregation at the town's only bowling alley, leaves three or four dead in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
February 12, 1968	Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre.
February 16, 1968	In Haleyville, Alabama, the first 9-1-1 emergency telephone system goes into service.
February 16, 1968	Civil Air Transport Flight 010 crashes near Shongshan Airport in Taiwan, killing 21 of the 63 people on board and one more on the ground.
February 20, 1968	The China Academy of Space Technology, China's main arm for the research, development, and creation of space satellites, is established in Beijing.
February 24, 1968	Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive is halted; South Vietnamese forces led by Ngo Quang Truong recapture the citadel of Hué.
March 2, 1968	Baggeridge Colliery closes marking the end of over 300 years of coal mining in the Black Country.
March 6, 1968	Three rebels are executed by Rhodesia, the first executions since UDI, prompting international condemnation.
March 7, 1968	Vietnam War: The United States and South Vietnamese military begin Operation Truong Cong Dinh to root out Viet Cong forces from the area surrounding Mỹ Tho.
March 12, 1968	Mauritius achieves independence from the United Kingdom.
March 16, 1968	Vietnam War: My Lai Massacre occurs; between 347 and 500 Vietnamese villagers are killed by American troops.
March 17, 1968	As a result of nerve gas testing by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps in Skull Valley, Utah, over 6,000 sheep are found dead.
March 18, 1968	Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
March 21, 1968	Battle of Karameh in Jordan between the Israel Defense Forces and the combined forces of the Jordanian Armed Forces and PLO.
March 28, 1968	Brazilian high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto is killed by military police at a student protest.
March 31, 1968	American President Lyndon B. Johnson speaks to the nation of "Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam" in a television address. At the conclusion of his speech, he announces: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
April 3, 1968	Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech; he was assassinated the next day.
April 4, 1968	Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
April 4, 1968	Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 6.
April 6, 1968	In the downtown district of Richmond, Indiana, a double explosion kills 41 and injures 150.
April 6, 1968	Pierre Elliott Trudeau wins the Liberal Party leadership election, and becomes Prime Minister of Canada soon afterward.
April 7, 1968	Two-time Formula One British World Champion Jim Clark dies in an accident during a Formula Two race in Hockenheim.
April 8, 1968	BOAC Flight 712 catches fire shortly after takeoff. As a result of her actions in the accident, Barbara Jane Harrison is awarded a posthumous George Cross, the only GC awarded to a woman in peacetime.
April 10, 1968	The TEV Wahine, a New Zealand ferry sinks in Wellington harbour due to a fierce storm – the strongest winds ever in Wellington. Out of the 734 people on board, fifty-three died.
April 11, 1968	President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
April 11, 1968	Assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, leader of the German student movement.
April 20, 1968	English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech.
April 20, 1968	South African Airways Flight 228 crashes near the Hosea Kutako International Airport in South West Africa (now Namibia), killing 123 people.
April 23, 1968	Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
April 29, 1968	The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with some of its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
May 3, 1968	Eighty-five people are killed when Braniff International Airways Flight 352 crashes near Dawson, Texas.
May 12, 1968	Vietnam War: North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces attack Australian troops defending Fire Support Base Coral.
May 22, 1968	The nuclear-powered submarine USS Scorpion sinks with 99 men aboard, 400 miles southwest of the Azores.
May 25, 1968	The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, is dedicated.
May 26, 1968	H-dagurinn in Iceland: Traffic changes from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight.
May 28, 1968	Garuda Indonesia Flight 892 crashes near Nala Sopara in India, killing 30.
May 30, 1968	Charles de Gaulle reappears publicly after his flight to Baden-Baden, Germany, and dissolves the French National Assembly by a radio appeal. Immediately after, less than one million of his supporters march on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This is the turning point of May 1968 events in France.
June 5, 1968	Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
June 8, 1968	James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested at London Heathrow Airport.
June 9, 1968	U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a national day of mourning following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
June 11, 1968	Lloyd J. Old identified the first cell surface antigens that could differentiate among different cell types.
June 30, 1968	Pope Paul VI issues the Credo of the People of God.
July 1, 1968	The United States Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program is officially established.
July 1, 1968	The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is signed in Washington, D.C., London and Moscow by sixty-two countries.
July 1, 1968	Formal separation of the United Auto Workers from the AFL–CIO in the United States.
July 8, 1968	The Chrysler wildcat strike begins in Detroit, Michigan.
July 17, 1968	Abdul Rahman Arif is overthrown and the Ba'ath Party is installed as the governing power in Iraq with Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr as the new Iraqi President.
July 18, 1968	Intel is founded in Mountain View, California.
July 20, 1968	The first International Special Olympics Summer Games are held at Soldier Field in Chicago, with about 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities.
July 23, 1968	Glenville shootout: In Cleveland, Ohio, a violent shootout between a Black Militant organization and the Cleveland Police Department occurs. During the shootout, a riot begins and lasts for five days.
July 23, 1968	The only successful hijacking of an El Al aircraft takes place when a Boeing 707 carrying ten crew and 38 passengers is taken over by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The aircraft was en route from Rome, to Lod, Israel.
July 26, 1968	Vietnam War: South Vietnamese opposition leader Trương Đình Dzu is sentenced to five years hard labor for advocating the formation of a coalition government as a way to move toward an end to the war.
August 1, 1968	The coronation is held of Hassanal Bolkiah, the 29th Sultan of Brunei.
August 2, 1968	An earthquake hits Casiguran, Aurora, Philippines killing more than 270 people and wounding 261.
August 13, 1968	Alexandros Panagoulis attempts to assassinate the Greek dictator Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos in Varkiza, Athens.
August 20, 1968	Cold War: Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring. East German participation is limited to a few specialists due to memories of the recent war. Only Albania and Romania refuse to participate.
August 21, 1968	Cold War: Nicolae Ceaușescu, leader of the Socialist Republic of Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
August 21, 1968	James Anderson Jr. posthumously receives the first Medal of Honor to be awarded to an African American U.S. Marine.
August 22, 1968	Pope Paul VI arrives in Bogotá, Colombia. It is the first visit of a pope to Latin America.
August 28, 1968	Police and protesters clash during 1968 Democratic National Convention protests as protesters chant "The whole world is watching".
September 2, 1968	Operation OAU begins during the Nigerian Civil War.
September 6, 1968	Swaziland becomes independent.
September 11, 1968	Air France Flight 1611 crashes off Nice, France, killing 89 passengers and six crew.
September 13, 1968	Cold War: Albania leaves the Warsaw Pact.
September 15, 1968	The Soviet Zond 5 spaceship is launched, becoming the first spacecraft to fly around the Moon and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.
September 30, 1968	The Boeing 747 is rolled out and shown to the public for the first time.
October 1, 1968	Guyana nationalizes the British Guiana Broadcasting Service, which would eventually become part of the National Communications Network, Guyana.
October 2, 1968	Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz orders soldiers to suppress a demonstration of unarmed students, ten days before the start of the 1968 Summer Olympics.
October 5, 1968	A Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in Derry is violently suppressed by police.
October 11, 1968	NASA launches Apollo 7, the first successful manned Apollo mission.
October 12, 1968	Equatorial Guinea becomes independent from Spain.
October 14, 1968	Apollo program: The first live television broadcast by American astronauts in orbit is performed by the Apollo 7 crew.
October 14, 1968	The 6.5 Mw  Meckering earthquake shakes the southwest portion of Western Australia with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent), causing $2.2 million in damage and leaving 20–28 people injured.
October 14, 1968	Jim Hines becomes the first man ever to break the so-called "ten-second barrier" in the 100-meter sprint with a time of 9.95 seconds.
October 16, 1968	Tommie Smith and John Carlos are ejected from the US Olympic team for participating in the Olympics Black Power salute.
October 16, 1968	Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney riots, inspired by the barring of Walter Rodney from the country.
October 16, 1968	Yasunari Kawabata becomes the first Japanese person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
October 25, 1968	A Fairchild F-27 crashes into Moose Mountain while on approach to Lebanon Municipal Airport in Lebanon, New Hampshire, killing 32 people.
October 26, 1968	Space Race: The Soyuz 3 mission achieves the first Soviet space rendezvous.
October 30, 1968	A squad of 120 North Korean Army commandos land in boats along a 25-mile long section of the eastern coast of South Korea in a failed attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee and bring about the reunification of Korea.
October 31, 1968	Vietnam War October surprise: Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announces to the nation that he has ordered a complete cessation of "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam" effective November 1.
November 1, 1968	The Motion Picture Association of America's film rating system is officially introduced, originating with the ratings G, M, R, and X.
November 5, 1968	Richard Nixon is elected as 37th President of the United States.
November 8, 1968	The Vienna Convention on Road Traffic is signed to facilitate international road traffic and to increase road safety by standardising the uniform traffic rules among the signatories.
November 11, 1968	Vietnam War: Operation Commando Hunt initiated. The goal is to interdict men and supplies on the Ho Chi Minh trail, through Laos into South Vietnam.
November 15, 1968	The Cleveland Transit System becomes the first transit system in the western hemisphere to provide direct rapid transit service from a city's downtown to its major airport.
November 17, 1968	British European Airways introduces the BAC One-Eleven into commercial service.
November 17, 1968	Viewers of the Raiders–Jets football game in the eastern United States are denied the opportunity to watch its exciting finish when NBC broadcasts Heidi instead, prompting changes to sports broadcasting in the U.S.
November 20, 1968	A total of 78 miners are killed in an explosion at the Consolidated Coal Company's No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia in the Farmington Mine disaster.
November 25, 1968	The Old Student House in Helsinki, Finland is occupied by a large group of University of Helsinki students.
November 26, 1968	Vietnam War: United States Air Force helicopter pilot James P. Fleming rescues an Army Special Forces unit pinned down by Viet Cong fire. He is later awarded the Medal of Honor.
November 27, 1968	Penny Ann Early becomes the first woman to play major professional basketball for the Kentucky Colonels in an ABA game against the Los Angeles Stars.
December 9, 1968	Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as "The Mother of All Demos", publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS).
December 10, 1968	Japan's biggest heist, the still-unsolved "300 million yen robbery", is carried out in Tokyo.
December 13, 1968	Brazilian President Artur da Costa e Silva issues AI-5 (Institutional Act No. 5), enabling government by decree and suspending habeas corpus.
December 16, 1968	Second Vatican Council: Official revocation of the Edict of Expulsion of Jews from Spain.
December 21, 1968	Apollo program: Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center, placing its crew on a lunar trajectory for the first visit to another celestial body by humans.
December 22, 1968	Cultural Revolution: People's Daily posted the instructions of Mao Zedong that "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty."
December 23, 1968	The 82 sailors from the USS Pueblo are released after eleven months of internment in North Korea.
December 24, 1968	Apollo program: The crew of Apollo 8 enters into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to do so. They performed ten lunar orbits and broadcast live TV pictures.
December 25, 1968	Apollo program: Apollo 8 performs the first successful Trans-Earth injection (TEI) maneuver, sending the crew and spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth from Lunar orbit.
December 25, 1968	Kilvenmani massacre: Forty-four Dalits (untouchables) are burnt to death in Kizhavenmani village, Tamil Nadu, a retaliation for a campaign for higher wages by Dalit laborers.
December 26, 1968	The Communist Party of the Philippines is established by Jose Maria Sison, breaking away from the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas-1930.
December 27, 1968	Apollo program: Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital crewed mission to the Moon.
December 31, 1968	The first flight of the Tupolev Tu-144, the first civilian supersonic transport in the world.
December 31, 1968	MacRobertson Miller Airlines Flight 1750 crashes near Port Hedland, Western Australia, killing all 26 people on board.