Although the Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, it was not actually carried out until 1961, during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. It was a failed American invasion of Cuba and is important in the larger context of the Cold War for solidifying the complete deterioration of American relations with Cuba and for precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis only a year later.

The Bay of Pigs invasion took place in 1961. The CIA trained exiled Cuban troops that then touched down on Cuban soil with the intention of overthrowing the Cuban government and assassinating Fidel Castro. It did not succeed.

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in outer space. He was a citizen of the Soviet Union and was the first man to orbit the earth in 1961. His achievement was part of the early years of the Space Race when the Soviet Union was the first nation to put a satellite into orbit and the first to put a man into space.

The Warsaw Pact is the name given to the treaty and alliance formed between the various communist states of Europe and the Soviet Union in response to the signing of NATO between the capitalist states of Western Europe and America.

The fall of the Soviet Union, and therefore the end of the Cold War, occurred in 1991. This represents the end of the great competition between capitalism and communism that had raged for forty-five years since the end of World War Two. Although it is worth noting that there are still communist nations in the world—China and North Korea are two prominent examples.

The Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848. It was the first large-scale organized meeting promoting the advancement of women’s rights.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 attempted to prohibit the disparity that existed in almost all businesses between the wages given to men and women. It made it illegal to pay a woman less than a man if they did the same amount of work in the same position. It is an important early law of the Civil Rights Era.

The Pill was made widely available for the first time in 1960. The release of a daily oral female contraceptive is perhaps one of the most significant turning points in the movement towards gender equality. For the first time women had near complete control over their own bodies, when they would have children, and their sexual freedom (at least in theory). It allowed women to plan when (and if) they would have children around their careers and life decisions. It led to a dramatic increase in women in the workplace, especially in technical and skilled career paths, and provided much of the impetus for later legal amendments to provide for guaranteed female equality.

Although the birth-control pill was not legally available to women until 1960, the first birth-control clinic in the United States was opened in New York City in 1916. This was a major development in the improvement of women’s rights and in the autonomy available to women in society as for the first time some women could control if and when they would have children.

The Great Society was a series of domestic programs and reforms instituted under President Lyndon B. Johnson. These are not to be confused with the New Deal programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt, although the two had somewhat similar goals. Part of the Great Society reforms were the extension of Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Acts, and the War on Poverty.