Vietnam War and the Turbulent 1960’s

  • Wright Brother’s Airplane

    Wright Brother’s Airplane
    Wilbur and Orville Wright were American inventors and pioneers of aviation. In 1903 the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight; they surpassed their own milestone two years later when they built and flew the first fully practical airplane.
  • Ho Chi Minh Established Communist Rule in Vietnam

    Ho Chi Minh Established Communist Rule in Vietnam
    Hồ Chí Minh led the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the Communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) in 1945 and defeating the French Union in 1954 at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, ending the First Indochina War.
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    Vietnam War

    The Vietnam War pitted communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and the United States. The war ended when U.S. forces withdrew in 1973 and Vietnam unified under Communist control two years later.
  • Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

    Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
    On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.
  • Tet Offensive

    Tet Offensive
    The Tet Offensive was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The offensive was an attempt to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in the Vietnam War. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the attacks, news coverage of the massive offensive shocked the American public and eroded support for the war effort.
  • My Lai Massacre

    My Lai Massacre
    was one of the most horrific incidents of violence committed against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. A company of American soldiers brutally killed most of the people—women, children and old men—in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 people were slaughtered in the My Lai massacre, including young girls and women who were raped and mutilated before being killed. U.S. Army officers covered up the carnage for a year before it was reported in the American press,
  • Vietnamization

    Vietnamization
    Vietnamization was a strategy that aimed to reduce American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam. The increasingly unpopular war had created deep rifts in American society. President Nixon believed his Vietnamization strategy, which involved building up South Vietnam’s armed forces and withdrawing U.S. troops, would prepare the South Vietnamese to act in their own defense against a North Vietnamese takeover and allow the United States
  • Woodstock Music Festival

    Woodstock Music Festival
    the Festival Woodstock Music and Art (in English , Woodstock Music & Art Fair ), or Woodstock Festival was a congregation hippie music of rock made from Friday 15 until dawn on Monday , 18 August of 1969 . It took place on a 240- hectare farm in Bethel , Sullivan County , New York State ; although it was scheduled to take place in the town of Wallkill (Orange County, New York), in the same state of New York, where the villagers, however, opposed.
  • Draft Lottery

    Draft Lottery
    On December 1, 1969 the Selective Service System of the United States conducted two lotteries to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War for men born from January 1, 1944 to December 31, 1950. These lotteries occurred during a period of conscription in the United States that lasted from 1947 to 1973. It was the first time a lottery system had been used to select men for military service since 1942.
  • Manson Family Murders

    Manson Family Murders
    the Manson Family was a desert commune and cult active in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s which was led by Charles Manson. The group consisted of approximately 100 of his followers who lived an unconventional lifestyle with habitual use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. Most of the group members were young women from middle-class backgrounds, many of whom were radicalized by Manson's teachings and drawn by hippie culture and communal living.
  • Apollo 11

    Apollo 11
    The primary objective of Apollo 11 was to complete a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961: perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth.
    Additional flight objectives included scientific exploration by the lunar module, or LM, crew; deployment of a television camera to transmit signals to Earth; and deployment of a solar wind composition experiment, seismic experiment package and a Laser Ranging Retroreflector.
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    Richard Nixon

    Richard Nixon, the 37th U.S. president, is best remembered as the only president ever to resign from office. Nixon stepped down in 1974, halfway through his second term, rather than face impeachment over his efforts to cover up illegal activities by members of his administration in the Watergate scandal. A former Republican congressman and U.S. senator from California, he served two terms as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) in the 1950s.
  • Kent State Shootings

    Kent State Shootings
    In May 1970, students protesting the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces, clashed with Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. When the Guardsmen shot and killed four students on May 4, the Kent State Shootings became the focal point of a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War.
  • Invasion of Cambodia

    Invasion of Cambodia
    President Nixon, at a news conference, defends the U.S. troop movement into Cambodia, saying the operation would provide six to eight months of time for training South Vietnamese forces and thus would shorten the war for Americans. Nixon reaffirmed his promise to withdraw 150,000 American soldiers by the following spring.
    The announcement that U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had invaded Cambodia resulted in a firestorm of protests and gave the antiwar movement a new rallying point.
  • Pentagon Papers

    Pentagon Papers
    The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
  • 26th Amendment

    26th Amendment
    passed in 1971, the 26th amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
  • War Powers Resolution

    War Powers Resolution
    The War Powers Resolution (also known as the War Powers Resolution of 1973 or the War Powers Act) is a federal law intended to check the U.S. president's power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of the U.S. Congress. The resolution was adopted in the form of a United States congressional joint resolution. It provides that the president can send the U.S. Armed Forces into action abroad only by declaration of war by Congress, "statutory authorization,
  • Fall of Saigon

    Fall of Saigon
    The Fall of Saigon also known as the Liberation of Saigon,was the capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong on 30 April 1975. The event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period to the formal reunification of Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.