Portal:1970s

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P:1970s

The 1970s (pronounced "nineteen-seventies"; commonly shortened to the "Seventies" or the "'70s") was a decade that began on January 1, 1970, and ended on December 31, 1979.

In the 21st century, historians have increasingly portrayed the 1970s as a "pivot of change" in world history, focusing especially on the economic upheavals^[1] that followed the end of the postwar economic boom.^[2] On a global scale, it was characterized by frequent coups, domestic conflicts and civil wars, and various political upheavals and armed conflicts which arose from or were related to decolonization, and the global struggle between NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Many regions had periods of high-intensity conflict, notably Southeast Asia, the Mideast, and Africa.

In the Western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. In the United Kingdom, the 1979 election resulted in the victory of its Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister. Industrialized countries experienced an economic recession due to an oil crisis caused by oil embargoes by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. The crisis saw the first instance of stagflation which began a political and economic trend of the replacement of Keynesian economic theory with neoliberal economic theory, with the first neoliberal government coming to power with the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The 1970s was also an era of great technological and scientific advances; since the appearance of the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, the decade was characterised by a profound transformation of computing units – by then rudimentary, spacious machines – into the realm of portability and home accessibility.

On the other hand, there were also great advances in fields such as physics, which saw the consolidation of quantum field theory at the end of the decade, mainly thanks to the confirmation of the existence of quarks and the detection of the first gauge bosons in addition to the photon, the Z boson and the gluon, part of what was christened in 1975 as the Standard Model.

In Asia, the People's Republic of China's international relations changed significantly following its recognition by the United Nations, the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of market liberalization by Mao's successors. Despite facing an oil crisis due to the OPEC embargo, the economy of Japan witnessed a large boom in this period, overtaking the economy of West Germany to become the second-largest in the world.^[3] The United States withdrew its military forces from the Vietnam War. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which led to the Soviet–Afghan War.

The 1970s saw an initial increase in violence in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria declared war on Israel, but in the late 1970s, the situation in the Middle East was fundamentally altered when Egypt signed the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty. Political tensions in Iran exploded with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty and established an Islamic republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.

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The fall of Saigon was the capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by North Vietnam and North Vietnam-controlled Viet Cong on 30 April 1975. The event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the collapse of the South Vietnamese state, leading to a transition period and the formal reunification of Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under communist rule on 2 July 1976.

The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong, under the command of General Văn Tiến Dũng, began their final attack on Saigon on 29 April 1975, with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces commanded by General Nguyễn Văn Toàn suffering a heavy artillery bombardment. By the afternoon of the next day, the PAVN and the Viet Cong had occupied the important points of the city and raised their flag over the South Vietnamese presidential palace. (Full article...)

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... that health economist Selma Mushkin estimated in the early 1970s that up to 50 percent of poor children in Washington, D.C., were affected by lead poisoning?
... that the Indian director Manhar Raskapur's films Mulu Manek and Kadu Makrani were both remade during the 1970s?
... that the Yerevan Children's Art Museum deliberately kept no records from the 1970s to the 1990s?
... that American teenagers of the 1960s and 1970s used to chat and arrange dates over the sound of the busy signal?
... that Cathie Dunsford was unable to find many books about lesbianism in the 1970s, but by the 1980s had herself become a writer and anthologist of lesbian literature?
... that an English country house was the location for the 1970s horror sexploitation films Virgin Witch, Satan's Slave and Terror?

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Callaghan in 1975

Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff KG PC (/ˈkæləhæn/ ^ⓘ KAL-ə-han; 27 March 1912 – 26 March 2005), commonly known as Jim Callaghan, was a British statesman and politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State, having also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967, Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970 and Foreign Secretary from 1974 to 1976. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1987.

Born into a working-class family in Portsmouth, Callaghan left school early and began his career as a tax inspector, before becoming a trade union official in the 1930s. He served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He was elected to Parliament at the 1945 election, and was regarded as being on the left wing of the Labour Party. He was appointed to the Attlee government as a parliamentary secretary in 1947, and began to move increasingly towards the right wing of the Labour Party, while maintaining his reputation as a "Keeper of the Cloth Cap" – that is, seen as maintaining close ties between Labour and the trade unions. Following Labour's defeat at the 1951 election, Callaghan increasingly became regarded as a leader of the right wing of the Labour Party, and stood for the positions of deputy leader in 1960 and for leader in 1963, but was defeated by George Brown for the former and Harold Wilson for the latter. (Full article...)

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The following are images from various 1970s-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Swedish model Efva Attling in a "midi" dress, Kings Road, London, 1971. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 2King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (from 1970s)
Image 3Susana Giménez wearing hotpants, 1977 (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 41973 Volvo P1800 sportwagon. (from 1970s)
Image 5In 1971 hotpants and bell-bottomed trousers were popular fashion trends (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 6Aerosmith had seven studio albums chart on the Billboard 200 in the 1970s. Their success in the decade, particularly of their albums Toys in the Attic (1975) and Rocks (1976), helped inspire future rock artists such as Slash and Kurt Cobain (from 1970s in music)
Image 7Queen, 1975 (from 1970s in music)
Image 8Singer Barry Manilow wears his hair longish in the soft, layered style favoured by men in the 1970s. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 9The Bee Gees, in 1968 (from 1970s in music)
Image 10Apple II (1977) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 11Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson from Sanford and Son (from 1970s)
Image 12Intellivision (1979) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 13Frisbee player Ken Westerfield wearing draw string bell bottoms in the 1970s (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 14Concorde landing at Farnborough in September 1974 (from 1970s)
Image 15The British band The Bee Gees were one of the biggest musical acts of the 1970s leading the disco phenomenon (from 1970s in music)
Image 16Line at a gas station in Maryland, June 15, 1979. (from 1970s)
Image 17Voyager 1 passing by Jupiter's Great Red Spot February 25, 1979 (from 1970s)
Image 18Pong (1972) (from 1970s)
Image 19Rigo Tovar (from 1970s in music)
Image 20Honda Civic sold well throughout the decade. (from 1970s)
Image 21AC/DC, August 1979 (from 1970s in music)
Image 22Mao Zedong wearing gray Zhongshan suit, 1972. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 231979 Iranian Revolution (from 1970s)
Image 24Anti-war protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1971. (from 1970s)
Image 25Elton John was one of the most commercially successful solo pop acts of the 1970s (from 1970s in music)
Image 26Led Zeppelin, 1977 (from 1970s in music)
Image 27A Women's Liberation march in Washington, D.C., 1970 (from 1970s)
Image 28By the early 1970s, miniskirts had reached an all-time popularity. This young English woman is wearing a fringed suede miniskirt, 1971. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 29The 1970 Bhola cyclone, considered the 20th century's worst cyclone disaster, kills an estimated 500,000 people in the densely populated Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan during November 1970. (from 1970s)
Image 30Singer Billy Preston in 1974 wearing an Afro hairstyle. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 31Singer Rod Stewart performing in 1976. He was one of the major British soft rock artists of the 1970s (from 1970s in music)
Image 32Margaret Thatcher shortly before becoming the United Kingdom's first woman Prime Minister in 1979. Thatcher's political and economic agenda began the first government committed to neoliberalism. (from 1970s)
Image 33VT100 (1978) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 34American casual attire, 1974. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 35Two women in 1979 wear the trendy tube tops, while the woman on the far left is wearing a rayon strapless dress (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 36Bob Marley, 1980 (from 1970s in music)
Image 37 Fairchild Channel F (1976) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 38The CN Tower was completed in 1976, becoming the world's tallest free-standing structure. (from 1970s)
Image 39African American couple, Michigan Avenue, Chicago, July 1975 (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 40Color TV-Game (1977) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 41Nixon and Zhou toast, 1972 (from 1970s)
Image 42Clockwise from top left: U.S. President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office following the Watergate scandal in 1974; The United States was still involved in the Vietnam War in the early decade. The New York Times leaked information regarding the nation's involvement in the war. Political pressure led to America's withdrawal from the war in 1973, and the Fall of Saigon in 1975 leading to evacuations of South Vietnamese that same year; the 1973 oil crisis causes a financial crisis throughout the developed world; both the leaders of Israel and Egypt shake hands after the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978; in 1971, the Pakistan Armed Forces commits the 1971 Bangladesh genocide to curb independence movements in East Pakistan, killing 300,000 to 3,000,000 people; this consequently leads to the Bangladesh Liberation War; the 1970 Bhola cyclone kills an estimated 500,000 people in the densely populated Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan in November 1970, and became the deadliest natural disaster in 40 years; the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ousts Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who is later replaced by an Islamic theocracy led by Ayatollah Khomeini; the popularity of the disco music genre and subculture peaks during the mid-to-late 1970s.
(from 1970s)
Image 43Microvision (1979) is the first handheld game console that used interchangeable cartridges. (from 1970s)
Image 44Ramones's lead guitarist Johnny Ramone performing in Toronto, 1977 (from 1970s in music)
Image 45British rock band Killing Floor, 1971. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 46Iranian prince Reza Pahlavi wearing Peacock Revolution-inspired velvet Nehru jacket and geometric print scarf, 1973. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 47The Vietnam War (1955–1975) (from 1970s)
Image 48British girls in 1975 in flared jeans (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 49Swedish model Ulla Jones dressed in a lurex halter top and matching flared trousers (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 50Kansas (from 1970s in music)
Image 51English girl in the mid-1970s wearing a wide-sleeved shirt, belted at the waist. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 52Actress Camille Keaton in 1972. Throughout most of the decade, women preferred light, natural-looking make-up for the daytime. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 53TRS-80 (1977) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 54Hank Williams (from 1970s in music)
Image 55Death Race (1976) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 56Pink Floyd, 1973 (from 1970s in music)
Image 57Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat shake hands, Camp David, 1978 (from 1970s)
Image 58Galaxian (1979) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 59Pong arcade machine (1972) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 60Park Chung Hee (from 1970s)
Image 61John Denver, 1975 (from 1970s in music)
Image 62Siouxsie Sioux of the English punk group Siouxsie and the Banshees. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 63American First Lady Pat Nixon wears a shirt with the wide collar that was popular until the final years of the decade. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 64Girl in 1973 with a "flicked" hairstyle. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 65Alan Bennett in 1973, wearing a wide necktie (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 66Nixon displays the V-for-victory sign as he departs the White House after resigning (from 1970s)
Image 67Microvision (1979) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 68Debby Boone song "You Light Up My Life" had the most weeks at number one (from 1970s in music)
Image 69Mid-70s Western-inspired outifts worn by country music group Asleep at the Wheel. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 70Punk pioneer Lene Lovich in 1979, with her trademark long plaited hair. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 71Pakistan Army General A. A. K. Niazi signing surrender agreement before Sh. Jagjit Singh Aurora of Indian Army after getting defeated in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War against East Pakistan, which eventually liberated as Bangladesh later. (from 1970s)
Image 72Two punks from the late 1970s (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 73Flared jeans and trousers were popular with both sexes as can be seen at this East German disco party in 1977. In the socialist part of Germany (until 1990), the government regarded western influences on cultural life of their population very critical, but factually tolerated them in many fields. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 74Footballer George Best wore long hair in 1976. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 751974 Ford Mustang interior (from 1970s)
Image 76Steve McQueen with sideburns, 1972. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 77Henry Mancini (from 1970s in music)
Image 78Polistil VG2 Pong clone (1978), made in Italy (from 1970s in video games)
Image 79Woman in miniskirt, 1970 (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 80Loretta Lynn (from 1970s in music)
Image 81Bruce Lee fostered the popularity of martial arts cinema (from 1970s)
Image 82The early 1970s' fashions were a continuation of the hippie look from the late 1960s. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 83Aldo Moro (from 1970s)
Image 84An artist impression of an American Apollo spacecraft and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docking, a propaganda portrait for the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project mission (from 1970s)
Image 85David Bowie in the early 1970s. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 86Diane von Fürstenberg's wrap dress, designed in the 1970s (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 87Paul Anka in 1961 (from 1970s in music)
Image 88Magnavox Odyssey (1972) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 89Willie Nelson became one of the most popular country music artists during the 1970s. (from 1970s in music)
Image 90The world map of military alliances in 1970s: Western allies (blue), Non-aligned countries (green) and Soviet allies (red) (from 1970s)
Image 91A young woman wearing a wrap dress. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 92A West German school girl with Schultüte in 1970, with a 'hippyish' outfit on. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 93Jose Jose (from 1970s in music)
Image 941976 flyer advertising the racing game Fonz (from 1970s in video games)
Image 95Dave Schultz won Stanley Cup two times (from 1970s)
Image 96In the 1970s, women's hair was usually worn long with a centre parting (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 97America's first space station Skylab in orbit February 8, 1974 (from 1970s)
Image 98The Eagles (from 1970s in music)
Image 99A couple at prom in late 1970s: Powder Tuxedo and sleeved dress. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 100British singer Rod Stewart, 1976. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 101Idi Amin (from 1970s)
Image 102Example of glam rock costume worn by Roy Wood and Wizzard, early 1970s. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 103United States President Jimmy Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT II treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna, Austria (from 1970s)
Image 104Egyptian military vehicles crossing the Suez Canal on October 7, 1973, during the Yom Kippur War. (from 1970s)
Image 105Home Pong console (museum recreation) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 106Isabel Perón becomes the first woman President of Argentina in 1974 and the first woman non-monarch head of state in the Western hemisphere. (from 1970s)
Image 107Viking 1, the first of two spacecraft sent to Mars, takes this picture of the landing site in Chryse Planitia (1978) (from 1970s)
Image 108The Swedish band ABBA was one of the most commercially successful European bands of the 1970s (from 1970s in music)
Image 109El Tri Band founder Alex Lora, on stage with the band in 2006 (from 1970s in music)
Image 110Linda Ronstadt in 1976 (from 1970s in music)
Image 111British rock band Led Zeppelin was one of the most popular and influential bands of the 1970s. The band's heavy, guitar-driven sound has led them to be cited as one of the progenitors of heavy metal. (from 1970s)
Image 112Asteroids (1979) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 113Fashion models in Leipzig, GDR, 1972. One of the girls is modelling a "maxi" dress. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 1141970 Dodge Challenger Trans Am, an example of a muscle car in the earlier part of the decade. (from 1970s)
Image 115Apollo 17 Astronaut Gene Cernan becomes the last man on the Moon, December 13, 1972 (from 1970s)
Image 116Pink Floyd performing The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, the highest-selling album of the decade and one of the highest-selling of all time. (from 1970s)
Image 117Salah Zulfikar and Zubaida Tharwat in The Other Man (1973) (from 1970s)
Image 118Charlie Rich (from 1970s in music)
Image 119Debbie Harry of Blondie in 1977. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 120Commodore PET (1977) (from 1970s in video games)
Image 121Los Angeles high school students, 1973. The tousled, blond surfer hair was popular for young men in southern California. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 122British rock band Queen (pictured here in 1977) was considered to be one of the most influential bands of the '70s (as well as the '80s), along with American rock band Eagles and others (from 1970s)
Image 123Three Los Angeles Chicanos in 1974. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 124Silk scarves were popular fashion accessories for women in the 1970s. (from 1970s in fashion)
Image 125Haile Selassie was overthrown from power in Ethiopia, ending one of the longest-lasting monarchies in world history. (from 1970s)
Image 126Typical mid to late 1970s Ted gear, as worn by Shakin' Stevens. (from 1970s in fashion)

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