  |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
 |
1969
• On 3 February, Yasser Arafat is elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). • On 28 April, Charles de Gaulle resigns as president of France after a referendum narrowly rejects constitutional reforms. • After an attack on a civil rights march in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) begins to reorganise and plan retaliation. On 19 August, the British army takes full responsibility for security in Northern Ireland. • On 20 July, American astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon. • In the Soviet Union, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the writers' union for being a dissident. • The Woodstock (New York) music festival in August, attending by over 500,000 people, features rock artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and signals the presence of a widespread hippie culture. • British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan's controversial Oh! Calcutta! sex revue is staged in London (where theatre censorship is abolished on 26 September) and New York. • Notable films include Easy Rider directed by Dennis Hopper, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy and Women in Love, Ken Russell's adaptation of the novel by D H Lawrence. |
|
