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Publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. The New Yorker started serializing Silent Spring in June 1962, and it was published in book form by Houghton Mifflin later that year. When the book Silent Spring was published, Rachel Carson was already a well-known writer on natural history, but had not previously been a social critic. -
Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
It is often cited as the founding moment of second-wave feminism. The book highlighted Friedan's view of a coercive and pervasive post-World War II ideology of female domesticity that stifled middle-class women's opportunities to be anything but homemakers. A survey she conducted of her classmates indicated that many felt depressed even though they supposedly enjoyed ideal lives with husbands, homes, and and children. She wrote this to tell people about how magazines, ect. make women fell worse -
UFW’s Nationwide Boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms
September 8, 1964 marks the beginning of the grape strike in Delano, California. Begun by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), led by Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), led by Cesar Chavez, soon joined the strike. By September 20 more than thirty farms were struck. A nationwide boycott of nonunion grapes followed. The two organizations merged a year later to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO. -
Publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader, published in 1965, is a book detailing resistance by car manufacturers to the introduction of safety features, like seat belts, and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety. It was a pioneering work, openly polemical but containing substantial references and material from industry insiders. It made Nader a household name. -
NOW is founded
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed in 1965 to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Though future NOW founders Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham fought hard as EEO commissioners to enforce Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination, they were ultimately outnumbered 3-2 , and the EEOC decided in September of 1965 that sex segregation in job advertising was permissible. -
Woodstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music". It was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969. -
Congress passes the Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act is the federal law designed to make sure that all Americans have air that is safe to breathe. Public health protection is the primary goal, though the law also seeks to protect our environment from damage caused by air pollution. -
First Earth Day celebration
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. While this first Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. -
The EPA is established
On July 9, 1970, citing rising concerns over environmental protection and conservation, President Richard Nixon transmitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 to the United States Congress by executive order, creating the EPA as a single, independent agency from a number of smaller arms of different federal agencies. Prior to the establishment of the EPA, the federal government was not structured to comprehensively regulate environmental pollutants. -
Supreme Court rules to legalize abortion in the Roe v. Wade case
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973),[1] was a landmark, controversial decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests for regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting the mother's health. -
Protesters from the AIM take over the reservation at Wounded Knee
The Wounded Knee incident began February 27, 1973 when the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota was seized by followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The occupiers controlled the town for 71 days while the United States Marshals Service and other law enforcement agencies cordoned off the town.
