January 19, 1981. United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

March, 1981. Solidarity, the Polish national trade union, stages a national strike in Poland in protest against police treatment of union activists.

March 30, 1981. President Ronald Reagan is wounded in an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C.

May 10, 1981. Socialist candidate Francois Mitterand wins the presidential election in France, promising a program of nationalization, taxes on the wealthy, and end to unemployment. (I will not draw the obvious parallel between France in 1981 and the U.S. in 2008, but it is obvious–and ominous– to me.)

May 13, 1981. Pope John Paul II is wounded in an assassination attempt as he blesses a crowd in St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

June 5, 1981. AIDS pandemic is first reported and becomes known when the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.

July 29, 1981. Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer marry in a publicly televised wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

August 12, 1981. IBM launches its new “Personal COmputer” (PC) for the home and office market. Because of the success of the IBM Personal Computer, the term PC will come to mean IBM’s personal computer and those computers that use IBM products.

October 6, 1981. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is assassinated during a military parade in Cairo. Vice-President Hosni Mubarak acts swiftly to take control of the country. The assassination is the work of army members who belong to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization; they oppose his negotiations with Israel.

December 13, 1981. Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland, to prevent the dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity.