The Stonewall riots in New York prompt a US campaign for Gay and Lesbian rights

Space-traveller Billy Pilgrim suffers horrors in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five

Mary Jo Kopechne drowns when US senator Edward Kennedy drives his car off the road on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts

Neil Armstrong, commander of the US space mission Apollo 11, sets foot on the moon and says: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'

British film director John Schlesinger makes Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight

Nearly half a million people turn up for the Woodstock Music Festival at a dairy farm in Bethel, New York

Canadian author Margaret Atwood publishes her first novel, The Edible Woman

An engineer in the newly formed Intel Corporation designs the first programmable microchip

The ARPANET, linking computers in four US cities, is the first step towards the internet

US author Maya Angelou publishes her autobiographical first novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Australian author David Malouf is first published as a poet, with his collection Bicycle and Other Poems

Salvador Allende, heading a Socialist and Marxist coalition, is elected president in Chile

US film director Robert Altman launches a successful and long-running theme with his Vietnam black comedy, M*A*S*H

President Nixon sends US troops into Cambodia to destroy Vietminh bases

Four students are killed by National Guards during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio

Two students are killed at the all-black Jackson State College in Mississippi when police fire into a dormitory during a riot

US feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics is her doctoral dissertation on the exploitation of women

A Quebec government minister, Pierre Laporte, is murdered by the Front de Libération du Québec

The Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, gives its first performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

Joe Frazier becomes the first boxer to beat Muhammad Ali in a professional fight, at New York's Madison Square Gardens

Hip-hop originates as a dance style in New York among young African Americans

The 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, succeeding his father as president of Haiti, becomes known as Baby Doc

Duel, about a motorist terrorized by a truck driver, launches Stephen Spielberg's career as a film director in Hollywood

Evidence of official deception concerning US involvement in Vietnam is published in the New York Times as the Pentagon Papers