Top News Stories from 1965

World Events

• The first US combat troops arrive in Vietnam. By the end of the year, 190,000 American soldiers are in Vietnam. Background: Vietnam War
• France withdraws its Atlantic fleet from NATO.
• Rhodesia unilaterally declares its independence from Britain (Nov. 11).
• US Marines land in the Dominican Republic as fighting persists between rebels and Dominican army (April 28).

U.S. Events

• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and more than 2,600 others arrested in Selma, Ala., during demonstrations against voter-registration rules (Feb. 1). Background: Civil Rights
• Malcolm X, black-nationalist leader, shot to death at Harlem rally (Feb. 21).
• Blacks riot for six days in Watts section of Los Angeles: 34 dead, over 1,000 injured, nearly 4,000 arrested (Aug. 11-16).

Economics

Sports

World Series

NBA Championship

Stanley Cup

Wimbledon

Kentucky Derby Champion

NCAA Basketball Championship

NCAA Football Champions

Entertainment

Events

• The Sound of Music premieres. An instant hit, the film was one of the top-grossing films of 1965 and remains one of film's most popular musicals.
• ABC pays an unprecedented $32 million for a four-year contract with the NCAA to broadcast football games on Saturday afternoons.
• Bill Cosby, starring in I Spy, becomes the first African American to headline a television show.

Movies

• Dr. Zhivago, The Sound of Music, A Thousand Clowns, Darling

Books

• James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man
• Amiri Baraka, The Dead Lecturer
• Heinrich Böll, The Clown
• Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord
• Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed
• Sylvia Plath, Ariel, The Uncollected Poems
• Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories
• Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Science

• Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson's (US) discovery of cosmic background radiation confirms the "Big Bang" theory. Background: Astronomy
• Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite, is launched.
• Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford aboard Gemini VI perform the first rendezvous with another spacecraft, Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and James Lovell. Background: US Staffed Space Flights
• Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov performs the first spacewalk (Mar. 18). Edward White II becomes the first American to walk in space (June 3). Background: Space Exploration

Death

• Winston Churchill
• Nat King Cole
• T.S. Eliot
• Adlai Stevenson

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