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| | | | World History timeline |
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| 1961 |
| | | Hassan II begins a 38-year reign as the king of Morocco | |
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| 1961 |
| | | President Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps, enabling US volunteers to work abroad | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Atmosphères, by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, achieves a mysterious blend of sound in what he calls 'micropolyphony' | |
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| 1961 |
| | | J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family | |
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| 1961 |
| | | The trial of Adolf Eichmann begins in an Israeli court in Jerusalem, with TV cameras permitted to broadcast the event live around the world | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel in space, orbiting the earth once in Vostok 1 | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Former British colony Sierra Leone becomes an independent state within the Commonwealth | |
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| 1961 |
| | | British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach | |
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| 1961 |
| | | An invasion force of about 1500 Cuban exiles comes ashore in Cuba's Bay of Pigs in an attempt to topple the Castro regime | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Two days after landing in the Bay of Pigs, 114 Cuban exiles are dead and about 1300 have been captured | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Joshua Nkomo founds ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti makes his operatic debut in Reggio Emilia, as Rodolfo in La Bohème | |
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| 1961 |
| | | US astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space, with a suborbital flight in Freedom 7 | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Arthur Miller writes the screenplay for The Misfits for his wife, Marilyn Monroe | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Caribbean novelist V.S. Naipaul features his Trinidad family in A House for Mr Biswas | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Two French generals, Raoul Salan and Edmond Jouhaud, form the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète) to preserve French rule in Algeria | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic for the past 30 years, is killed by a machine-gun attack on his car | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Commonwealth opposition to apartheid causes South Africa to leave the organization and become a republic | |
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| 1961 |
| | | US author Joseph Heller publishes his first novel, Catch-22, set in the last months of World War II | |
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| 1961 |
| | | British choreographer John Cranko becomes director of the Stuttgart Ballet | |
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| c. 1961 |
| | | The drug Thalidomide, synthesized in West Germany, is shown to have been the cause of severe defects in about 12,000 children born in 46 countries | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Kirov company at Le Bourget airport and seeks political asylum in France | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Syria withdraws from the United Arab Republic (UAR) seeing it as unacceptably dominated by Egypt | |
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| 1961 |
| | | President Kennedy commits the US to placing a man on the moon and bringing him back safely by 1970 | |
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| 1961 |
| | | The novelist Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his log cabin in Idaho | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Nelson Mandela and the ANC adopt guerrilla tactics against the apartheid regime in South Africa | |
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| 1961 |
| | | In Babi Yar the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko tackles the subject of Russian anti-Semitism | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski uses 'aleatory counterpoint' in his Venetian Games | |
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| 1961 |
| | | The East German government erects the Berlin Wall to prevent an exodus of its citizens | |
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| 1961 |
| | | French film director François Truffaut makes Jules et Jim, starring Jeanne Moreau and Oskar Werner | |
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| 1961 |
| | | The UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, dies in a plane crash while trying to secure peace in Katanga | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Largely under the influence of Tito, a summit is held by nations eager to be non-aligned in the Cold War | |
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| 1961 |
| | | The southern part of the British Cameroons votes to merge with Cameroun, becoming the federal republic of Cameroon | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Rudolf Nureyev makes his first appearance in a western company, dancing in The Sleeping Beauty for the Marquis de Cuevas | |
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| 1961 |
| | | Tanganyika becomes an independent nation with Julius Nyerere as prime minister | |
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| 1961 |
| | | British novelist Muriel Spark publishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in an Edinburgh school in the 1930s | |
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