1961 Calendar
What Happened In Year 1961?
- January 26, 1961 – John F. Kennedy appoints Janet G. Travell to be his physician. This is the first time a woman holds this appointment.
- February 15, 1961 – New Year’s Day in Chinese calendar. Start of the year of the Metal Ox in Chinese astrology.
- March 1, 1961 – Uganda becomes self-governing and holds its first elections.
- April 20, 1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed troops against Cuba.
- April 30, 1961 – K-19, the first Soviet nuclear submarine equipped with nuclear missiles, is commissioned.
- May 1, 1961 – The Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, proclaims Cuba a socialist nation and abolishes elections.
- May 5, 1961 – The Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 3 – Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into outer space, making a sub-orbital flight of 15 minutes.
- May 16, 1961 – Park Chung-hee leads a coup d'état to overthrow the Second Republic of South Korea.
- May 25, 1961 – Apollo program: U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a “man on the Moon” before the end of the decade.
- May 30, 1961 – Long time Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is assassinated in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
- June 4, 1961 – In the Vienna summit, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sparks the Berlin Crisis by threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and ending American, British and French access to East Berlin.
- June 16, 1961 – Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Soviet Union.
- July 21, 1961 – Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission – Gus Grissom piloting Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space (in a suborbital mission).
- August 10, 1961 – First use in Vietnam War of the Agent Orange by the U.S. Army.
- September 11, 1961 – Foundation of the World Wildlife Fund.
- September 12, 1961 – The African and Malagasy Union is founded.
- September 28, 1961 – A military coup in Damascus effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria.
- October 29, 1961 – Syria exits from the United Arab Republic.
- October 30, 1961 – Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honour inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead.
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