All 119 References in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Explained

Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, leading the country through the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. During World War II he was also the person responsible for the United States’ use of atomic weapons against Japan—a decision that resulted in the deaths of some 200,000 civilians.

A shining star of the movie musicals of the 1950s and the sex comedies of the 1960s, Doris Day was once the United States’ leading box-office attraction.

Communist victory in China’s 1945–49 civil war led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, a communist government initially led by Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao’s goals were to create a fully socialist society—and, eventually, world communism.

Picture an American rock star with a little too much of a bad-boy image. Johnnie Ray was the Elvis of the early 1950s (and his oeuvre, full of suggestive dance moves and revolutionary lyrics, paved the way for the King’s stardom).

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific premiered in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Based on “one of the most remarkable books” to come out of World War II (at least according to The New York Times) and a sharp diversion from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s previous work, South Pacific was intended as a frank condemnation of racial prejudice.

Walter Winchell was a journalist and radio host whose mix of news and gossip attracted the attention of Americans from the 1930s through the 1950s. By the 1950s Winchell had turned ultraconservative in his punditry: he was a fan of Senator Joseph McCarthy, supporting—and spreading—McCarthy’s wild tales of communist infiltration of the United States.

Joe DiMaggio’s status as a star with the New York Yankees was only compounded by his 1954 marriage to actor and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (who appears later in this list).

That’s U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy to you. This Wisconsin politician lent his name to McCarthyism, which describes a period in the early 1950s when McCarthy and his allies conducted a widespread communist witch hunt. Entertainers, CIA agents, army lawyers, and journalists were indiscriminately accused of spying for the Soviet Union.

Richard Nixon was elected vice president of the United States in 1952. (His presidential exploits, beginning in 1969, are covered later in the song.)

In 1954 the Studebaker Corporation—once the world’s largest producer of horse-drawn vehicles and a leader in automobile manufacturing—merged with the Packard Motor Car Company. Studebaker-Packard lasted only 10 years in the United States before halting production.

In 1946 about 6,000 American homes had televisions; by 1951 the number was 12,000,000.

After World War II the Soviet Union occupied all land on the Korean peninsula north of the 38th parallel, and the United States occupied all land to the south on the peninsula. Though the Allied powers originally planned to exit and leave Korea a united nation once more, Soviet and American interference created two very different governments: a communist state in the north and a democratic state in the south. When the U.N. recognized the southern Republic of Korea as an independent state (1947), North Korea waged a war (1950) to reunify the peninsula—an effort that ultimately failed. The two countries have remained separated ever since.

See above.

Famous for her very public private life (including the aforementioned marriage to Joe DiMaggio) as well as for performances in such Hollywood blockbusters as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955), Marilyn Monroe was an actor, singer, and pop culture icon. She died in 1962 after an overdose of barbiturates.

After being convicted of sharing plans for nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg became the first American civilians to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage.

H-bomb, hydrogen bomb, or thermonuclear bomb—it’s a devastating weapon by any name. Different from an atomic bomb, the H-bomb’s enormous explosive power results from an uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction in which isotopes of hydrogen combine under extremely high temperatures to form helium in a process known as nuclear fusion. During the late 1980s nuclear-armed nations possessed, collectively, some 40,000 of these weapons.

A six-time world champion, Sugar Ray Robinson is often considered to be the best professional boxer in world history.

The village of P'anmunjŏm, located in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, hosted the truce conference between United Nations representatives and North Korean authorities held from 1951 to 1953.

Though his derision for the acting profession was no secret, Marlon Brando’s theatrical and Hollywood stardom spanned from 1947’s A Streetcar Named Desire to 1972’s The Godfather (and beyond).

Rodgers and Hammerstein returned for their fifth musical, in 1951. The King and I follows the romantic relationship between British schoolteacher Anna and the king of Siam. The stage version and the 1956 film featured Yul Brynner, a Russian-born white actor who sometimes claimed Mongolian and Roma heritage, as the Siamese king.

Published in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a coming-of-age story that follows Holden Caulfield, a disillusioned teenager frustrated by “phonies.” The novel captivated millions of readers, including a particularly notorious one: Mark David Chapman, whose 1980 murder of John Lennon was motivated by the desire to “become” Holden.

Dwight D. Eisenhower served as president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. The United States’ first major civil rights victories since Reconstruction, including Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1957, occurred during his tenure.

On April 12, 1955, it was announced to the public that trials of the first polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, were successful—the vaccine worked.

Elizabeth II was crowned queen of the United Kingdom in 1953, following the death of her father, George VI.

Rocky Marciano was the world heavyweight boxing champion from September 23, 1952, when he knocked out former champion Jersey Joe Walcott, to his retirement in 1956. He was killed in an airplane crash in 1969.

The extravagantly costumed pianist Liberace built his career playing popular music in his own unique style. The Liberace Show, his television variety program, premiered in 1952.

George Santayana was a Spanish American aesthetic theorist and philosopher known for the philosophical texts Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Dominations and Powers (1951). He died in 1952.

Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after a quarter of a century of dictatorial rule over the Soviet Union that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

After Stalin’s death his close collaborator Georgy Malenkov became prime minister of the Soviet Union as well as the Communist Party’s senior secretary. He held the latter role for only a few weeks before being replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. Still Malenkov remained an influential force in reducing arms appropriations, increasing the production of consumer goods, and providing incentives for collective farmworkers. As Stalin’s collaborator, he also had the blood of millions on his hands.

In 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser and other members of the revolutionary Free Officers group ousted Egypt’s monarchical government in a near-bloodless coup d’état. He went on to serve as Egypt’s prime minister and, later, president.

Prolific Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953.

When former Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife, Barbara Sears, divorced in 1954, the media responded with a frenzy of coverage (which may or may not have foreshadowed the response to the Brad Pitt–Jennifer Aniston split of 2005).

(Let’s take this explanation with a grain of salt, though. The Rockefeller family has so many famous members that it’s difficult to say for certain which one Billy Joel was referencing.)

Roy Campanella, one of major league baseball’s first Black athletes, was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player three times: in 1951, 1953, and 1955.

During the Cold War the European and Asian states under Soviet influence were known as the Communist Bloc (or the Eastern or Soviet bloc).

American lawyer Roy Cohn assisted Joseph McCarthy in his accusations of communist activity in the United States during McCarthyism…and later was cited in future president Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal as advising Trump to never apologize. (Apologies, Cohn and Trump felt, were a sign of weakness.)

Army colonel Juan Perón served as president of Argentina in 1946–52, 1952–55, and, finally, 1973–74. Though Perón’s legacy was one of political turmoil (he was ousted more than once from the presidency), Argentines largely supported the de facto leadership of his wife Eva, a former actress who arranged financial support for labor unions, expanded Argentina’s social services, and advocated for women’s suffrage—and whose life was the basis for the musical Evita.

One of the great virtuoso conductors of the first half of the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini died in 1957.

Dacron, which debuted in 1951, is the brand name of an artificial high-strength textile fiber sometimes used in medical procedures. Patients suffering from coarctation of the aorta may find a section of their aorta replaced by Dacron.

No, this one isn’t referencing a waterfall. The Viet Minh victory over the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu essentially ended the First Indochina War.

Bill Haley and His Comets was a white musical group represented by Decca, the only major American company to retain its Black performers during the 1940s; their song “Rock Around the Clock” became one of the best-selling rock-and-roll hits of all time.

Albert Einstein, the famed German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity, died on April 18, 1955.

James Dean starred in only a few films before dying in a 1955 car accident at age 24, but his performances—and his restless bad-boy image—remain iconic in American culture.

The Brooklyn Dodgers (now the Los Angeles Dodgers) lost the World Series to the New York Yankees in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953 before finally beating their crosstown rival in 1955. Their lineup included Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella.

Disney’s Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier premiered in 1955, following the real (but often exaggerated) exploits of the legendary frontiersman and politician.

Another Disney moment: the animated feature Peter Pan, based on J.M. Barrie’s play of the same name, premiered in 1953.

The “King of Rock and Roll” dominated the charts from 1956 to 1958, capturing the adoration of American teens (especially young women) with such hits as “Love Me Tender” and “All Shook Up.”

Though Walt Disney began planning themed experiences at his Burbank film studio as early as the 1940s, Disneyland—his Anaheim, California, theme park—didn’t become reality until July 17, 1955. The original iteration of the park included Main Street, U.S.A, Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland (and, according to accounts of opening day, suffered from a barrage of unexpected guests who either sneaked in or entered with forged tickets).

The French film actress Brigitte Bardot became an international sex symbol in the 1950s and ’60s after posing for the cover of Elle at age 15. Though she was beloved by French leftists during the early years of her career for breaking film taboos against nudity, after her retirement Bardot was fined for inciting racial hatred after publishing anti-Muslim and homophobic commentary.

Much of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule was centered around the capital of Budapest.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks’s arrest after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Alabama triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, a 381-day mass protest. In 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Montgomery’s segregated public transit to be unconstitutional.

Nikita Khrushchev (as seen in number 29 on this list) served as prime minister of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964, during which time he pursued policies of de-Stalinization and “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West.

In 1956 Hollywood star and Hitchcock muse Grace Kelly abandoned her acting career to marry Rainier III, prince of Monaco.

One of the first soap operas to successfully air in prime time, Peyton Place premiered in 1964 and introduced American viewers to a small New England town secretly populated by scandal.

Months of political tension between Egypt and Britain and France prompted Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal Company—in other words, to declare the canal, formerly a joint British-French enterprise, under Egyptian management. Though British and French leaders were outraged, Nasser remained firm in his decision to extricate Egypt from at least one remnant of colonial rule.

Three years after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated public schooling unconstitutional, nine Black students enrolled at the previously white-only Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The intense harassment and violence perpetrated against the students by white people eventually prompted U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send protection in the form of federal troops.

Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, an epic tale of the effects of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and its aftermath on a bourgeois family, was published in 1957 and became an international hit, earning Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature. (The rejection of the novel by Soviet authorities, however, compelled Pasternak to decline the award.)

New York Yankees player Mickey Mantle ended his 17-year baseball career in 1968, having helped the Yankees win seven World series and having hit 536 home runs.

Beat writer Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, a road-trip novel described by Britannica editor Jeff Wallenfeldt as “the Bible of the original hipsters.”

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first in a series of three artificial Earth satellites, on October 4, 1957, many Americans were shocked: they had wrongly assumed that their country was technologically ahead of the Soviets. Thus began the space race, in which the United States and the Soviet Union each fought to be the first to reach various milestones in space exploration.

Zhou Enlai served as the first-ever premier of the People’s Republic of China, from its creation in 1949 until 1976. He was also its widely traveling foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. He signed a treaty in 1950 that committed China and the Soviet Union to cooperate, and he was key to orchestrating Richard Nixon’s historic meeting of Mao Zedong in China in 1972. (The song uses the Wade-Giles romanization of his name: Chou En-lai.)

Released in 1957, The Bridge on the River Kwai (based on the novel Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï by Pierre Boulle) was a British-American war film following the lives of men imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. Boulle, the novelist, was credited for the film and awarded an Oscar for best screenplay—even though it had actually been writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman who adapted it. Since Wilson and Foreman were both on the Hollywood blacklist for alleged communist ties, Boulle received the film’s honors alone.

When Lebanon’s President Camille Chamoun refused to cut ties with Britain and France during the Suez War (number 54), Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser accused Lebanon of Western sympathies. When Syria entered a union with Egypt in 1958, Chamoun’s Muslim opponents in Lebanon demonstrated to join the alliance. In May the demonstration became an insurrection.

Charles de Gaulle served as president of France from 1958 to 1969. Determined to establish France as an independent power, he amassed a nuclear arsenal and withdrew France from the military command of NATO, following his own views on foreign policy.

In 1958 the New York Giants followed the Brooklyn Dodgers from New York to California, becoming the San Francisco Giants instead.

Nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather, a James Dean enthusiast who tried to imitate Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause bad-boy style, embarked on a 1958 killing spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people, including the parents and young sister of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Starkweather was arrested after a high-speed chase; Starkweather was executed, and Fugate—then one of the youngest Americans ever charged with first-degree murder—was sentenced to life in prison.

The medical compound thalidomide, developed in the 1950s in West Germany as a sedative and tool for preventing nausea, was discovered to cause severe fetal malformations when taken during pregnancy. It was removed from the market in 1961–62 after affecting thousands of children. (Thalidomide has other therapeutic uses today.)

After hearing Elvis Presley in 1955, former rhythm-and-blues devotee Buddy Holly became a full-time rock-and-roller. With his band the Crickets, Holly released the meticulously crafted tracks “Not Fade Away,” “Peggy Sue,” and “That’ll be the Day.”

Considered one of Hollywood’s best biblical epics, 1959’s Ben Hur stars Charlton Heston as a young Jewish prince who encounters Jesus Christ.

In May 1959, monkeys called Able and Baker became the first primates to survive the journey home after being launched into space by the United States.

In 1959 La Cosa Nostra mob boss Vito Genovese was convicted of conspiracy to violate narcotics laws and sentenced to 15 years in prison—from which setting Genovese would continue to operate the organized crime group via his vast network of contacts.

Variations of the hula hoop have existed since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that the toy was marketed in plastic (then a brand-new material). An estimated 100 million hula hoops were sold in the United States alone between 1958 and 1960.

Fidel Castro served as the political leader of Cuba from 1959, after he led a revolution, until 2008, transforming his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere.

Ford’s Edsel automobile (1958–60) was named for Henry Ford’s son (and former Ford Motor Company president) Edsel—at the time, a not-uncommon name among American men. After the new car flopped commercially, “Edsel” disappeared from baby name books for good. Apparently, no one wanted their child associated with a vehicle that Time magazine described as looking “like a midwife’s view of labor and delivery.”

Billy Joel wasn’t talking about the band. In 1960 an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev calling the flight an “aggressive act” by the U.S. When the U.S. claimed that the flight hadn’t been authorized—even though its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, admitted to working for the CIA—the incident caused the collapse of a Parisian summit conference between the U.S., the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France.

Syngman Rhee was the first president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), serving from 1948 to 1960. He spent much of his life working for Korean independence and, by the late 1940s, its reunification; his policies as president were authoritarian, and he eventually died in exile in the United States.

Revealed by a 1959 federal investigation, the “payola” scandal saw radio deejays taking bribes to promote certain songs and records.

John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 to 1963.

Though the creator of the dance craze “The Twist” (1959) was in reality the rhythm-and-blues singer-songwriter Hank Ballard, American Bandstand regular Chubby Checker is credited with popularizing the dance among white and Black audiences.

Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful thriller Psycho, released in 1960, received four Academy Award nominations and a spot in the classic film canon. The film’s eerie antagonist, played by Anthony Perkins, was loosely based on real-life serial killer Ed Gein.

In 1960 the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained independence from Belgium, the country which, under Leopold II, was responsible for widespread atrocities there beginning in the 1880s.

With novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway became a major voice of the Lost Generation, a group of American writers disillusioned with life after World War I. He committed suicide in 1961.

In 1962 German Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was executed by the State of Israel for his extensive role in the Holocaust, which included organizing the transport of Jewish residents of Nazi-occupied states to death camps.

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land follows the challenges a human raised on Mars faces while trying to relate to customs on Earth. An icon of 1960s counterculture, the book won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962.

Sometimes called the Shakespeare of his generation by his fans, Bob Dylan sold tens of millions of folk and rock albums in the 1960s alone and became a voice for the burgeoning counterculture.

From 1961 to 1989 the Berlin Wall separated West Berlin, a democratic state allied with the West, from East Berlin, a communist state aligned with the Soviet Union.

The CIA had planned an invasion of Cuba since 1960, shortly after Fidel Castro came to power and transformed Cuba into a communist state. They executed the plan in 1961, when three U.S. airplanes piloted by Cubans bombed Cuban air bases and, two days later, landed at several sites. But the small force of the Bay of Pigs invasion—named for the principal landing location on Cuba’s south-central coast—contained nothing close to the strength of Castro’s troops. The CIA-directed agents were captured, and the invasion failed.

Released in 1962, the historical epic Lawrence of Arabia became an almost-instant classic and made its relatively unknown lead actor Peter O’Toole into a major star.

The intense fandom that grew around the British rock group the Beatles was called Beatlemania: the first collective frenzy around a band enabled by mass media.

When a court battle determined that U.S. Air Force veteran James Meredith had been repeatedly denied entrance to the University of Mississippi only because he was Black, the school was forced to admit him; in anticipation of racist mob violence, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called in federal protection in 1962 so that Meredith could safely register for classes.

In 1962 John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, completing three orbits. (The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had completed a single orbit in 1961, making him the first person in space.)

American boxer Sonny Liston became the world heavyweight champion on September 25, 1962, when he knocked out Floyd Patterson in the first round of their match.

Giovanni Battista Montini was elected pope on June 21, 1963, choosing the name Paul VI. He oversaw much of the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 through 1965, and his tenure affirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control and its firm stance on priestly celibacy.

The revolutionary civil rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 while delivering a lecture in Harlem, New York.

In 1961 British Secretary of State for War John Profumo began an affair with 19-year-old Christine Keeler, a dancer with Russian connections. Though Profumo lied to Parliament in 1963, saying that there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in the couple’s relationship, evidence to the contrary was too strong to ignore. Ten weeks later Profumo resigned. Keeler, in response to the scandal, posed for a series of provocative publicity shots—one of which, picturing her nude astride a chair, became one of the most iconic photographs of the 1960s. The incident spelled the downfall of Profumo’s Conservative Party: within a year, the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in a national election.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965) saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule in favor of married persons’ constitutional right to use birth control, striking down laws that made it a crime to use or recommend contraception in many U.S. states.

Ho Chi Minh, who was president of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1969, waged the longest—and most costly—battle against the colonial system of all 20th-century revolutionaries. His death in 1969 damaged chances for an early settlement of tensions between Vietnam and the United States.

Years after serving as Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon was elected the 37th president of the United States in 1968.

On July 20, 1969, the first human beings arrived on the Moon. American astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first step off the Apollo 11 spacecraft and onto the Moon’s surface, saying: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, though the most famous of the 1960s rock festivals, was something of a disaster. Few people bought tickets, but some 400,000 people showed up, mostly demanding free entry—which they received, since the festival’s security was pretty much nonexistent. The event left its organizers practically bankrupt, though they were luckily able to salvage their finances by holding on to the film and recording rights of the “Three Days of Peace and Music.”

Richard Nixon’s second presidential term was ended by Watergate, a series of interconnected scandals uncovered following the arrest of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate hotel complex. Investigations into the burglary led to the discovery of multiple layers of presidential misconduct: Nixon had reportedly covered up White House involvement in the break-in, participated in money laundering schemes to help elect Republicans to Congress, and illegally sabotaged political opponents. Facing impeachment, Nixon resigned in 1974; the names of future American scandals were fated to include the suffix -gate.

Spearheaded by artists such as Lenny Kaye, the Seeds, and Iggy and the Stooges, punk rock was blossoming into an international movement by the mid-1970s.

Menachem Begin served as prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983. In 1978 he and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for securing peace between their countries.

Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. His tenure was charactered by his conservative Republicanism, fervent anticommunism, and attempts at folksy charm.

Arab-Israeli tensions over land occupation mounted in the 1970s. In March 1977 U.S. President Jimmy Carter spoke of the need for a Palestinian homeland and described Palestinian participation in the Arab-Israeli peace process as crucial. Israel’s cabinet continued to reject the suggestion of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s participation.

Between 1968 and 1970 nearly 200 airplane hijackings took place in Europe and the Middle East. The trend was continued throughout the ’70s by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a militant Marxist group that organized hijackings of a number of aircraft. The most notable, the hijacking of a French jet airliner en route from Israel to France, resulted in the Entebbe raid. When PFLP members held the plane’s 103 Israeli or Jewish passengers hostage for the release of 53 imprisoned militants, Israel responded by dispatching a commando squad; within an hour of the squad’s arrival in Entebbe, Uganda, the hostages had been freed and the seven PFLP militants had been killed.

In 1979 the Shiʿi cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led a revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Western-aligned leader of Iran. Khomeini served as Iran’s ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years.

In 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, intervening in support of the Afghan communist government in its conflict with anti-communist Muslim guerrillas. The Soviets remained there for nearly a decade.

The American television game show Wheel of Fortune premiered in 1975.

On June 18, 1983, astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She was preceded by two Soviet women: cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

The heavy metal subgenre known as death metal, populated by artists such as Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, garnered criticism for lyrics encouraging self-harm when three young fans attempted or committed suicide from 1984 to 1985.

The 1980s was marked by a period of inflation often attributed to the United States’ growing foreign debts.

A growing population of Vietnam War veterans experiencing homelessness in the 1980s exposed the lack of quality health care, mental health care, and other resources available to veterans in the United States.

On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report describing a rare lung infection affecting five gay men in Los Angeles, California. The next year the disease, discovered to affect not only gay men but also intravenous drug users and women with male sexual partners, became known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Though the AIDS epidemic first spread during the Reagan administration, homophobic and inaccurate characterization of AIDS as a “gay plague” meant that Reagan himself kept quiet about it for years. He refused to say the word “AIDS” in public until 1985, when the epidemic had already killed thousands.

Another devastation to the 1980s United States was the crack epidemic: a significant increase in the use of crack cocaine, an affordable, highly addictive, and smokable form of cocaine. As President Ronald Reagan intensified the U.S. government’s “War on Drugs,” defendants in federal crack cocaine cases (about 80 percent of whom were Black Americans, as of 2003) were penalized more harshly than defendants in cases involving other drugs, including powder cocaine. “Mandatory minimum” prison sentences for drug offenses meant that possession of five grams of crack triggered an automatic five year sentence—while it took possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine to result in the same sentence.

Bernhard Goetz was a self-proclaimed vigilante who was, in reality, a mass shooter: he shot four Black men who he claimed were planning to rob him on a New York City subway on December 22, 1984. By saying he acted in self-defense—even though there was no evidence that the men planned to rob him—Goetz was eventually found not guilty of attempted murder. He was convicted only of illegal weapons possession and served less than a year in prison.

In July 1988 more than 70 syringes and vials of blood washed up on New York’s Staten Island beach. The cause was improper disposal of medical waste at the area’s largest landfill: instead of following the proper procedures, workers were sending medical waste and other garbage out to sea.

Following weeks of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China demanding democratic reforms, martial law was declared in Beijing. When Chinese troops attempted to reach the square, they were initially thwarted by thousands of Beijing citizens blocking their way to protect the protesters. The military eventually broke through, however, and hundreds were killed and thousands wounded on the night of June 3–4, 1989. The conflict also produced one of the most iconic images of resistance to authoritarianism: an unidentified person now called Tank Man stopping a column of Chinese tanks.

As soft drink companies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo each fought to win market share in the United States, both hired rock stars as corporate representatives: Coke went with Paula Abdul and Pepsi with Michael Jackson.