Important Historical Events of the year 1976, Year 1976 in History
List of 1976 Major News Events in History, Most Important Historical Events in 1976
What happened in the year 1976?
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 1, 1976 | A bomb explodes on board Middle East Airlines Flight 438 over Qaisumah, Saudi Arabia, killing all 81 people on board. |
| January 2, 1976 | The Gale of January 1976 begins, resulting in coastal flooding around the southern North Sea coasts, affecting countries from Ireland to Yugoslavia and causing at least 82 deaths and US$1.3 billion in damage. |
| January 3, 1976 | The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, comes into force. |
| January 4, 1976 | The Troubles: The Ulster Volunteer Force shoots dead six Irish Catholic civilians in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The next day, gunmen would shoot dead ten Protestant civilians nearby in retaliation. |
| January 5, 1976 | The Khmer Rouge announce that the new Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea is ratified. |
| January 5, 1976 | The Troubles: Gunmen shoot dead ten Protestant civilians after stopping their minibus at Kingsmill in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK, allegedly as retaliation for a string of attacks on Catholic civilians in the area by Loyalists, particularly the killing of six Catholics the night before. |
| January 12, 1976 | The United Nations Security Council votes 11–1 to allow the Palestine Liberation Organization to participate in a Security Council debate (without voting rights). |
| January 15, 1976 | Gerald Ford's would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is sentenced to life in prison. |
| January 18, 1976 | Lebanese Christian militias kill at least 1,000 in Karantina, Beirut. |
| January 21, 1976 | Commercial service of Concorde begins with the London-Bahrain and Paris-Rio routes. |
| February 4, 1976 | In Guatemala and Honduras an earthquake kills more than 22,000. |
| February 6, 1976 | In testimony before a United States Senate subcommittee, Lockheed Corporation president Carl Kotchian admits that the company had paid out approximately $3 million in bribes to the office of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. |
| February 9, 1976 | Aeroflot Flight 3739, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes during takeoff from Irkutsk Airport, killing 24. |
| February 19, 1976 | Executive Order 9066, which led to the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps, is rescinded by President Gerald Ford's Proclamation 4417. |
| February 24, 1976 | The current constitution of Cuba is formally proclaimed. |
| February 27, 1976 | The formerly Spanish territory of Western Sahara, under the auspices of the Polisario Front declares independence as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. |
| March 4, 1976 | The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention is formally dissolved in Northern Ireland resulting in direct rule of Northern Ireland from London by the British parliament. |
| March 9, 1976 | Forty-two people die in the Cavalese cable car disaster, the worst cable-car accident to date. |
| March 24, 1976 | In Argentina, the armed forces overthrow the constitutional government of President Isabel Perón and start a 7-year dictatorial period self-styled the National Reorganization Process.[53] |
| March 27, 1976 | The first section of the Washington Metro opens to the public. |
| March 30, 1976 | Israeli-Palestinian conflict: in the first organized response against Israeli policies by a Palestinian collective since 1948, Palestinians create the first Land Day. |
| April 1, 1976 | Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple Computer, Inc. |
| April 2, 1976 | Prince Norodom Sihanouk resigns as leader of Cambodia and is placed under house arrest. |
| April 5, 1976 | In China, the April Fifth Movement leads to the Tiananmen Incident. |
| April 7, 1976 | Member of Parliament and suspected spy John Stonehouse resigns from the Labour Party after being arrested for faking his own death. |
| April 11, 1976 | The Apple I is created. |
| April 13, 1976 | The United States Treasury Department reintroduces the two-dollar bill as a Federal Reserve Note on Thomas Jefferson's 233rd birthday as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration. |
| April 13, 1976 | Forty workers die in an explosion at the Lapua ammunition factory, the deadliest accidental disaster in modern history in Finland. |
| April 27, 1976 | Thirty-seven people are killed when American Airlines Flight 625 crashes at Cyril E. King Airport in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. |
| May 6, 1976 | The 6.5 Mw Friuli earthquake affected Northern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), leaving 900–978 dead and 1,700–2,400 injured. |
| May 8, 1976 | The rollercoaster The New Revolution, the first steel coaster with a vertical loop, opens at Six Flags Magic Mountain. |
| May 21, 1976 | Twenty-nine people are killed in the Yuba City bus disaster in Martinez, California. |
| May 24, 1976 | The Judgment of Paris takes place in France, launching California as a worldwide force in the production of quality wine. |
| June 5, 1976 | The Teton Dam in Idaho, United States, collapses. Eleven people are killed as a result of flooding. |
| June 16, 1976 | Soweto uprising: A non-violent march by 15,000 students in Soweto, South Africa, turns into days of rioting when police open fire on the crowd. |
| June 25, 1976 | Missouri Governor Kit Bond issues an executive order rescinding the Extermination Order, formally apologizing on behalf of the state of Missouri for the suffering it had caused to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. |
| June 27, 1976 | Air France Flight 139 (Tel Aviv-Athens-Paris) is hijacked en route to Paris by the PFLP and redirected to Entebbe, Uganda. |
| June 28, 1976 | The Angolan court sentences US and UK mercenaries to death sentences and prison terms in the Luanda Trial. |
| June 29, 1976 | The Seychelles become independent from the United Kingdom. |
| June 29, 1976 | The Conference of Communist and Workers Parties of Europe convenes in East Berlin. |
| July 1, 1976 | Portugal grants autonomy to Madeira. |
| July 2, 1976 | End of South Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam annexes the former South Vietnam to form the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. |
| July 4, 1976 | Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists. |
| July 4, 1976 | The U.S. celebrates its Bicentennial. |
| July 10, 1976 | Four mercenaries (one American and three British) are executed in Angola following the Luanda Trial. |
| July 17, 1976 | East Timor is annexed and becomes the 27th province of Indonesia. |
| July 17, 1976 | The opening of the Summer Olympics in Montreal is marred by 25 African teams boycotting the games because of New Zealand's participation. Contrary to rulings by other international sports organizations, the IOC had declined to exclude New Zealand because of their participation in South African sporting events during apartheid. |
| July 18, 1976 | Nadia Comăneci becomes the first person in Olympic Games history to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics at the 1976 Summer Olympics. |
| July 19, 1976 | Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal is created. |
| July 20, 1976 | The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars. |
| July 21, 1976 | Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, is assassinated by the Provisional IRA. |
| July 22, 1976 | Japan completes its last reparation to the Philippines for war crimes committed during imperial Japan's conquest of the country in the Second World War. |
| July 25, 1976 | Viking program: Viking 1 takes the famous Face on Mars photo. |
| July 28, 1976 | The Tangshan earthquake |
| July 29, 1976 | In New York City, David Berkowitz (a.k.a. the "Son of Sam") kills one person and seriously wounds another in the first of a series of attacks. |
| August 1, 1976 | Niki Lauda has a severe accident that almost claims his life at the German Grand Prix at Nurburgring.[7] |
| August 7, 1976 | Viking program: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars. |
| August 12, 1976 | Between 1,000 and 3,500 Palestinians are killed in the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, one of the bloodiest events of the Lebanese Civil War. |
| August 15, 1976 | SAETA Flight 232 crashes into the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador, killing all 59 people on board; the wreckage is not discovered until 2002. |
| August 17, 1976 | A magnitude 7.9 earthquake hits off the coast of Mindanao, Philippines, triggering a destructive tsunami, killing between 5,000-8,000 people and leaving more than 90,000 homeless.[12] |
| August 18, 1976 | The Korean axe murder incident in Panmunjom results in the deaths of two US Army officers. |
| August 18, 1976 | The Soviet Union’s robotic probe Luna 24 successfully lands on the Moon. |
| September 3, 1976 | Viking program: The American Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars. |
| September 6, 1976 | Cold War: Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot Viktor Belenko lands a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 jet fighter at Hakodate in Japan and requests political asylum in the United States; his request is granted. |
| September 10, 1976 | A British Airways Hawker Siddeley Trident and an Inex-Adria DC-9 collide near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, killing 176. |
| September 11, 1976 | A bomb planted by a Croatian terrorist, Zvonko Bušić, is found at New York's Grand Central Terminal; one NYPD officer is killed trying to defuse it. |
| September 16, 1976 | Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir. |
| September 17, 1976 | The Space Shuttle Enterprise is unveiled by NASA. |
| September 19, 1976 | Turkish Airlines Flight 452 hits the Taurus Mountains, outskirt of Karatepe, Turkey, killing all 154 passengers and crew. |
| September 19, 1976 | Two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II jets fly out to investigate an unidentified flying object, when both independently lose instrumentation and communications as they approach, only to have them restored upon withdrawal. |
| September 21, 1976 | Orlando Letelier is assassinated in Washington, D.C because had been a member of the former Chilean Marxist government. |
| September 21, 1976 | Seychelles joins the United Nations. |
| October 6, 1976 | Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 is destroyed by two bombs, placed on board by an anti-Castro militant group. |
| October 6, 1976 | Premier Hua Guofeng arrests the Gang of Four, ending the Cultural Revolution in China. |
| October 6, 1976 | Dozens are killed by the Thai army in the Thammasat University massacre. |
| October 11, 1976 | George Washington is posthumously promoted to the grade of General of the Armies. |
| October 13, 1976 | The first electron micrograph of an Ebola virus is taken at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by Dr. F. A. Murphy. |
| October 20, 1976 | The Luling–Destrehan Ferry MV George Prince is struck by the Norwegian freighter SS Frosta while crossing the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Seventy-eight passengers and crew die, and only 18 people aboard the ferry survive. |
| October 22, 1976 | Red Dye No. 4 is banned by the US Food and Drug Administration after it is discovered that it causes tumors in the bladders of dogs. |
| November 15, 1976 | René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois take power to become the first Quebec government of the 20th century clearly in favor of independence. |
| November 23, 1976 | Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m undersea without breathing equipment. |
| November 24, 1976 | The Çaldıran–Muradiye earthquake in eastern Turkey kills between 4,000 and 5,000 people. |
| December 2, 1976 | Fidel Castro becomes President of Cuba, replacing Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado. |
| December 25, 1976 | EgyptAir Flight 664, a Boeing 707-366C, crashes on approach to Don Mueang International Airport, killing 71 people. |