1960s Timeline

1960	Joan Baez and Pete Seeger play at the Newport Folk Festival (May). John Kennedy and Richard Nixon engage in the first of their televised presidential debates (September 26).
1961	Bob Dylan begins to perform in Greenwich Village clubs (January). Poet Robert Frost recites his poem “The Gift Outright” at the Kennedy Inaugural (January 20). Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his Ketchum, Idaho, home (July 2).
1962	John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth (February 20). Actress Marilyn Monroe dies after apparently taking a drug overdose (July 22). Federal legislation is approved declaring LSD a hallucinogenic drug that must be regulated by law (October).
1963	Julia Child demonstrates on television how to prepare bæuf bourguignon, beginning a series of cooking lessons on educational television stations (February 11). Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar, commits suicide (February 11). Little Stevie Wonder becomes the first performer simultaneously to top the American pop singles, pop albums, and rhythm and blues singles charts (August 24). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC (August 28). Millions of people remain in front of their television sets by the hour to watch events relating to the death and funeral of President John F. Kennedy, with regular programming returning on November 26 (November 22–25).
1964	The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show (February 9). Twelve Beatles records are on the top one hundred list (April). Students initiate the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley (October). ABC, CBS, and NBC simultaneously broadcast in color for the first time (December 20).
1965	A teach-in to oppose the Vietnam War occurs at the University of Michigan, beginning a new antiwar tactic (March 2). Bob Dylan switches to an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival and is roundly booed (July 25). Vatican II ends in Rome; church officials later issue new guidelines that modernize Catholic ritual and church architecture (December 5).
196	From this date forward cigarette packages contain a warning that “Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health” (January 1). Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” is Number One in Billboard for the week of January 1 (January 1). Betty Friedan and other advocates for women’s rights create the National Organization for Women (NOW) (October 29).
1967	The Rolling Stones perform the song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” onThe Ed Sullivan Show (January). The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–21 in the first Super Bowl (January 15). The Monterey International Pop Festival occurs in Monterey, California, beginning the Summer of Love (June 16–18). William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner is published by Random House and engenders controversy over its depiction of Turner (September 9).
1968	Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin found the Youth International Party, a radical group better known as the Yippies (January 16). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members occupy buildings at Columbia University to protest the Vietnam War (April). The science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey opens in New York City (April 3). Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test appears from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, describing the 1964 LSD trip across the country by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (August 19).
1969	The first commercial Boeing 747 flight lands successfully (February 8). The Doors’ Jim Morrison is arrested and charged with obscene actions while performing in Miami (March 1). Beatle John Lennon and Yoko Ono marry (March 20). Police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, precipitating the “Stonewall Riots” and the beginning of the gay liberation movement (June 27). Harper Lee’s novel of southern racism, To Kill a Mockingbird, is published (July 11). Neil Armstrong walks on the moon (July 20). Members of Charles Manson’s “family” commit multiple murders, including the murder of actress Sharon Tate (August 9). Almost one-half million people watch many of the country’s most famous singers and musicians perform at Woodstock, New York (August 15–17). Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, dies of alcoholism (October 21).