Archie comics had been around for years, since 1941, but in 1969 The Archies, a Saturday morning cartoon band that actually consisted of a group of studio musicians managed by Don Kirshner, has their one and only #1 hit song. The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” was the 1969 number-one single of the year in the U.S., UK, and South Africa.
1971: Events and Inventions
January 2, 1971. The United States bans radio and television ads for cigarettes. Here’s a montage of cigarette ads from the 1960’s:
January 15, 1971. The Aswan High Dam officially opens in Egypt.
February 13, 1971. Backed by American air and artillery support, South Vietnamese troops invade Laos in order to root out Vietcong fighters who have fled across the border.
February 20, 1971. Idi Amin, former boxing champion and army leader, declares himself president of Uganda. He bans all political activities and elections for the next five years.
April 17, 1971. Libya, Syria and Egypt sign an agreement to form a confederation.
April 21, 1971. Nineteen-year-old Jena-Claude “Baby-Doc” Duvalier succeeds his father “Papa Doc” as president of Haiti.
July, 1971. The first combined heart and lung transplant is performed in a South African hospital.
August, 1971. Internment without trial is introduced in Northern Ireland. Over 300 republicans are arrested secretly in pre-dawn raids. Some loyalists are later arrested. British troops begin clearing operations in Belfast following the worst rioting in years.
October 27, 1971. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire. General Mobutu becomes Mobutu Sésé Seko and forced all his citizens to adopt African names and many cities were also renamed.
December 16, 1971. Pakistan surrenders to India after a two-week war. East Pakistan becomes the independent nation of Bangladesh.
1970: Events and Inventions
January 15, 1970. After a 32-month fight for independence from Nigeria, Biafran forces surrender to the Nigerian government.
April 17, 1970. Apollo 13, crippled by an explosion in its service module early in its flight, returns to the earth safely, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. The three astronauts on board are safe and in good health.
April 29, 1970. The U.S. invades Cambodia to hunt out the Viet Cong; widespread, large antiwar protests occur in the U.S.
September 1, 1970. An assassination attempt against King Hussein of Jordan precipitates the Black September crisis, war between Palestinian guerillas and Jordanian troops.
September 27, 1970. King Hussein of Jordan and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yassir Arafat sign a peace agreement to end the war between Jordanian troops and Palestinian guerrillas.
October, 1970. Anwar Sadat becomes president of Egypt after the death of Gamel Abdel Nasser. Sadat is expected to take a more moderate attitude toward Israel and the U.S.
October 9, 1970. The Khmer Republic is officially proclaimed in Cambodia. The Khmer Republic is a right-wing pro-United States military-led government headed by General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak that took power in the March 18, 1970 coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then the country’s head of state.
October 22-24, 1970. Chilean army commander René Schneider is shot in Santiago; the government declares a state of emergency. Schneider dies October 25th. On October 24, Salvador Allende is elected President of Chile.
November 13, 1970. Hafez al-Assad comes to power in Syria, following a military coup within the Ba’ath party. Assad will rule Syria for the next thirty years until his death in June, 2000.
November 13, 1970. 500,000 people are feared dead after a tidal wave hits East Pakistan (Bangladesh).
Saturday Review of Books: February 25, 2012
“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.†~Stephen King
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.
1969: Events and Inventions
February 4, 1969. In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
March 7, 1969. 70 year old Golda Meir, head of the Israeli Labor Party, becomes Israel’s new prime minister.
April 4, 1969. In Houston, Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart in a man, Hanskell Karp, who lives for 65 hours.
April 9, 1969. The supersonic airliner Concorde 002 takes to the air in the UK for a maiden flight of 21 minutes.
July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon.
August 15, 1969. The British government sends troops into Derry, Northern Ireland to restore the peace between groups of Protestant and Catholic street fighters in the war-torn city. Troops will also be sent to Belfast to break up fighting there.
August 15-17, 1969. The world’s biggest rock festival is held at Woodstock in upstate New York. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, The Who, and Santana are a few of he many performers at the festival.
September, 1969. North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh dies as the war in Vietnam continues.
September, 1969. In Libya, a group of army officers, led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, seize powere while King Idris of Libya is out of the country. Gaddafi will rule Libya until his death in 2011.
September 28, 1969. The Social Democrats and the Free Democrats receive a majority of votes in the German parliamentary elections, and decide to form a common government. Willy Brandt becomes chancellor, the first Social Democrat to be elected in 39 years.
October, 1969. Civil war rages in Nigeria as the rebel republic of Biafra fights for independence from Nigerian rule. 300,000 civilian refugees in Biafra are facing starvation as the Nigerian government has stopped Red Cross flights carrying relief aid. Nigeria says that the Biafran rebels are using the flights to get arms as well as food.
Poetry Friday: Poem #41, The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1833
“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”~Marianne Moore
Of course, I am reminded of Anne of Green Gables whenever I read or hear mention of this poem.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro’ the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
By the margin, willow-veil’d
Slide the heavy barges trail’d
By slow horses; and unhail’d
The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d
Skimming down to Camelot:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to tower’d Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers “‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott”.
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the ‘curse’ may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,
Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad,
Goes by to tower’d Camelot;
And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often thro’ the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights,
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
“I am half-sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.
Polyglots and Hyperpolyglots
In the author’s note at the end of The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead (Semicolon review here), Mr. Lawhead writes about Thomas Young, a polymath of the 18th and early 19th centuries who is also a character in the book:
“Born in the tiny village of Milverton in SOmerset, England, he was an infant prodigy, having learned to read by the age of two. . . . He was able to converse and write letters in Latin to his no-doubt perplexed friends and family when he was six years old. . . By fourteen years of age he was fluent in not only ancient Greek and Latin—he amused himself by translating his textbooks into and out of classical languages—but had also acquired French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and, of course, Amharic.”
Thomas Young went on to become a doctor and to study physics, proving that light behaves as a wave as well as a particle and experimenting with wavelengths of light and electromagnetic energy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, particularly interested in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Serindipitously, I heard about the book Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard on NPR and saw a tweet about this news article, an excerpt from the book, all on the same afternoon that I finished Mr. Lawhead’s book. The idea of being able to learn twelve or more languages and speak them all fluently is fascinating. In fact, I learned when I was studying Spanish in college that most people can’t learn to speak fluently like a native in any foreign language if they start learning the language after about the age of puberty. Something in the brain “sets itself”, and it is very difficult to learn to make sounds that were not a part of your language learning before age twelve or thirteen. This hypothesis is not accepted by all language learning scholars, but it does seem to explain why an intelligent person such as Henry Kissinger who learned English as a young man speaks the language with such an accent even though he uses sophisticated vocabulary and syntax.
There’s also a phenomenon called language interference, I think, which causes me, whenever I try to learn a third language, to speak with a Spanish accent. For instance, I’ve tried to pick up some German and some French, but whenever I read vocabulary in those languages aloud, it comes out sounding Spanish-accented. So I can’t really understand how these “hyperpolyglots”, mostly men, could learn so many languages.
But it is another fascination. And Babel No More is another book to add to my TBR list.
1968: Events and Inventions
January, 1968. The Czechoslovak Communist Party chooses a new leader, liberal Alexander Dubcek.
January 30, 1968. The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.
February, 1968. the North Korean government refuses to release the U.S. spy ship Pueblo, captured last month within Korean waters.
March, 1968. In the U.S., Lockheed presents the world’s largest aircraft to date, the Galaxy.
April 4, 1968. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee by escaped convict Jams Earl Ray. The night before his death Dr. King gave a speech at a church in Memphis:
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
May 6-13, 1968. Paris student riots; one million march through streets of Paris protesting the war in Vietnam and other grievances.
May 19, 1968. Nigerian forces capture Port Harcourt and form a ring around the Biafrans. This contributes to a humanitarian disaster as the surrounded population already suffers from hunger and starvation.
June 6, 1968. Robert Kennedy, younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Democratic candidate for president of the U.S., is assassinated in Los Angeles by lone Jordanian gunman Sirhan Sirhan.
July, 1968. Thirty-six nations, including the United States, the USSR, and Britain, sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
August 22, 1968. The Prague Spring of increasing freedom in Czechoslovakia ends abruptly as 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5000 tanks enter the country to force the Czechs to remain within the Soviet sphere. Unarmed Czech youths try, unsuccessfully, to resist the Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague and other cities. Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek’s goal and policy was “socialism with a human face”, but the Soviet Union and its vassal states will not allow changes in Czechoslovakia.
August 24, 1968. France explodes its first hydrogen bomb.
September, 1968. At least 11,000 people die in a series of earthquakes in Iran lasting for two days.
1967: Books and Literature
Published in 1967:
The Chosen by Chaim Potok. Set in the 1940’s, two Jewish teens, one Hasidic and the other orthodox, but less strict in his observance, develop a friendship that survives the vicissitudes of adolescence and changing times.
Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander. In this children’s fantasy novel, the fourth of five volumes in the series Chronicles of Prydain, based on Celtic/Welsh mythology, Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, searches for his true heritage. The book is a classic coming-of-age story set in the fantasy kingdom of Prydain.
Endless Night by Agatha Christie. One of my favorite Christie novels, this mystery/suspense story features neither Hercule Poirot nor Miss Marple, but rather stands on its own with its own fascinating characters. The title comes from a poem by William Blake.
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Ms. Hinton wrote this classic YA novel when she was only sixteen years old.
Christy by Catherine Marshall. A wonderful, wonderful book that I have been unable to “sell” any of my young adult children on reading. Christy is an eighteen year old innocent idealist when she goes to the mountains of Appalachia to teach school in a one-room schoolhouse. By the end of the story she’s a grown-up woman who’s experienced friendship, grief, and love. I don’t know why I can’t get my urchins to read it.
White Mountains and The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher. I read these classic science fiction/dystopian novels when I was a kid of a girl. I remember them being quite chilling. Perhaps they’re due for a republishing in light of the current popularity of dystopian fiction.
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. I remember when everyone was talking about the movie version of this horror novel. Major elements of the story were inspired by the publicity surrounding Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan which had been founded in 1966. The eponymous Rosemary basically conceives a child with Satan.
Where Eagles Dare by Alistair McLean. World War II action adventure. The movie based on this book, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton, is one of Engineer Husband’s favorites.
100 Years of Solitude, Cien años de soledad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Garcia Marquez was a pioneer in the genre of “magical realism”, a style that has since become quite popular in all sorts of literature. (Magical realism: an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world.) I need to go back and read this book in English because when I read it in college in Spanish I couldn’t tell the magical elements from my lack of fluency in the language.
Nicolas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. Nonfiction biography of the last Romanov rulers of Russia. For more books about this tragic family, see my post on Reading About the Romanovs.
1967: Events and Inventions
February, 1967. The U.S. launches Operation Junction City, its biggest assault yet against the Vietcong in Vietnam.
April, 1967. General George Papadopoulos takes over the government of Greece in a military coup.
April 9, 1967. The first Boeing 737, a twin-engine narrow-body jet airliner, takes its maiden flight. As of December 2011, Boeing had built 7010 of this model airliner for use around the world.
May 22-27, 1967. Egyptian President Nasser declares the Straits of Tiran , between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas separating the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea, closed to Israeli shipping. He says, “”Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”
May 30, 1967. Colonel Ojukwu of the Ibo tribe in eastern Nigeria proclaims the region to be the independent republic of Biafra. European and U.S. citizens flee Biafra as Nigerian troops attack the breakaway republic.
June, 1967. China detonates its first H-bomb in Xiang Jang, a remote area of southwestern China.
June 5-10, 1967. The Six Day War. The Israeli air force launches surprise air strikes against Arab forces. In a decisive victory, Israel takes control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
June 27, 1967. The first automatic cash machine is installed, in the office of the Barclays Bank in Enfield, England.
October 10, 1967. Ernesto “Che” Guevarra, Cuban revolutionary hero who helped Fidel Castro overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba, is shot to death by the Bolivian army while on a mission to spread the communist revolution to the rest of the world.
December, 1967. The first successful heart transplant is performed by Dr. Christian Barnard in South Africa.