It’s 40 years later! Prepare yourself for a year (or at least a few weeks) of breathless nostalgia as the Baby Boomers put on their misty eyes and remember back to one of their most defining years as young people (and just when you think it’s over, the 30 year reunion of the “summer of ‘69″ will be upon us next year).

For the record, I wasn’t there. My parents weren’t married yet (although that was becoming less and less of an issue for childbearing in 1968). But, in my studies of generational defining moments, 1968/9 is one of those periods of a few months in which it can be said, “everything changed”. (Probably the most defining such period in recent history was April 1989 to February 1990 - Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall comes down, Perestroika and Mandela’s release all within 8 months!).

But back to 1968. Before you look at my list of highlights below, why not take the “do you remember 1968″ online quiz.

Now, here are the highlights:

• January 21 - A US Airforce B-52 crashes in Greenland, and discharges 4 nuclear bombs
• January 30 - The Tet Offensive begins in the Vietnam war (Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam, including an attack on the US Embassy in Saigon the following day)
• March 16 - My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War (where American troops kill scores of civilians, coming just weeks after the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong officer - part of the turning of the tide of American public opinion about the war)
• March 17 - A demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square, involving prominent figures such as Vanessa Redgrave, against the Vietnam War leads to 91 police injured and 200 demonstrators arrested
• March 18 - The US Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back the US dollar
• March 22 - Daniel Cohn-Bendit and 7 other students occupy the Administrative offices of Nanterre University. This was the start of a few months of chaos in France in which ultimately 12 million workers went on strike, 122 factories were occupied, and students across multiple universities went on rampages (read more here). The “May of 68″ is a symbol of the resistance, as many believe that a revolution is starting in France. It all nearly bring downs the French government in May.
• April 4 - Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee
• April 23-April 30 - Student protesters at Columbia University (NYC) take over the administration buildings and shut down the university in protest against Vietnam War
• May 19 - Nigerian forces capture Port Harcourt and surround Biafrans. A humanitarian disaster ensues for a people already suffering with hunger and starvation in Biafra
• June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. He dies from his injuries the next day
• August 21 - Czechoslovakia is invaded
• September 17 - The England cricket tour of South Africa is cancelled when the South Africans refuse to Basil D’Oliveira, a Cape Coloured, in the side.
• October 11 - NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, which included the first live TV broadcast from space
• December 9 - Douglas Engelbart publicly demonstrates his pioneering hypertext system, NLS, in San Francisco
• December 22 - Mao Zedong advocates educated youth in urban China to be re-educated in the country. It marks the start of the “Up to the mountains and down to the villages” movement
• December 24 - US spacecraft Apollo 8 enters orbit around the Moon, and humans see the dark side of the moon and an “earth rise” for the first time

The year was characterised by unrest around the world (Jordan and Israel have border skirmishes, the Vietnam-USA war is in full swing, etc), protests around the world against the Vietnam war and against governments (hundreds of people injured in USA, UK, Europe, Mexico, Jamaica, South Africa, and many other countries around the world), civil rights unrest in the USA (including the deaths of several protestors, and the infamous black power salute at the Mexico Olympics), the further decolonisation of the world (Nauru, Mauritius, Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea), coups (Iraq, Panama), military accidents (planes crashing, submarines sinking - Israeli, French, US - and nerve gas leaks), assassinations and attempted assassinations,

For a fuller listing (and to add your own memories to the list), check out Wikipedia’s listing on 1968.

To listen to a WBCS Newsradio sound file of the year’s news highlights (and lowlights), go here (it works in IE only, not Firefox on my machine).