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Top Song(s)
• The Beatles - Hey Jude
• Mary Hopkin - Those Were the Days
• The Rolling Stones - Jumpin' Jack Flash
• Otis Redding - (Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay
• Bobby Goldsboro - Honey
Top Film(s)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Rosemary's Baby
• Night of the Living Dead
• The Producers
Best Selling Book(s)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
• 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
• A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Airport - Arthur Hailey
Famous Deaths
• January 4 - Joseph Pholien, Belgian politician, 37th Prime Minister of Belgium
• February 25 – Camille Huysmans, Belgian politician, 34th Prime Minister of Belgium
• March 15 – Khuang Aphaiwong, 4th Prime Minister of Thailand, country leader during World War II
• April 4 - Martin Luther King Jr., American civil rights leader, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• June 4 - Sir Walter Nash, 27th Prime Minister of New Zealand
• July 18 – Corneille Heymans, Belgian physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
• September 23 – Padre Pio, Italian Roman Catholic priest and saint
• October 27 – Lise Meitner, German-Austrian physicist, discoverer of nuclear fission
• November 1 – Georgios Papandreou, 3-time Prime Minister of Greece
• December 30 - Augustus Agar, British naval officer, Victoria Cross recipient
Medical/Science/Technology
• Beniamino Segre describes a version of the tennis ball theorem.
• Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs the second successful human heart transplant, in South Africa.
• Outbreak of acute gastroenteritis among schoolchildren in Norwalk, Ohio, the first identified norovirus.
• Publication of a Harvard committee report on irreversible coma establishes a paradigm for defining brain death.
• Doctors perform the first successful bone marrow transplant, to treat severe combined immunodeficiency.
• DiGeorge syndrome is first described by pediatric endocrinologist Angelo DiGeorge.
• Georges Charpak develops the multiwire proportional chamber for particle detection at CERN.
• John Darley and Bibb Latané demonstrate the bystander effect.
• Walter Mischel publishes Personality and Assessment.
• Miomir Vukobratovic proposes Zero Moment Point, a theoretical model to explain biped locomotion.
Political
• January 5 – The United States indicts Benjamin Spock, famous pediatrician, for conspiracy to violate the draft laws.
• January 17 – Lyndon B. Johnson calls for the non-conversion of the U.S. dollar.
• February 16 – The first 9-1-1 call is made by Alabama senator, Rankin Fite in Haleyville, Alabama.
• March 11 – President Lyndon B. Johnson mandates that all computers purchased by the government support ASCII character encoding.
• March 12 – President Lyndon B. Johnson edges out antiwar candidate Eugene J. McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary.
• March 18 – Gold standard: The Congress of the United States repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back U.S. currency.
• March 31 – U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson announces he will not seek re-election in the 1968 presidential election.
• April 11 – U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
• June 5 – Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, by Sirhan Sirhan.
• July 1 – The Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program against the Viet Cong is officially established.
• November 5 - Republican challenger Richard M. Nixon defeats the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey
National
• January 7 – First-class US postage is raised from 5 cents to 6 cents. US Prime rate is 6%.
• January 22 – Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In debuts on NBC.
• February 11 – Madison Square Garden in New York City opens.
• February 16 – The first 9-1-1 call is made by Alabama senator, Rankin Fite in Haleyville, Alabama.
• February 29 – The Kerner Commission releases its final report on the causes of the 1967 race riots.
• March 14 – Nerve gas leaks from the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground near Skull Valley, Utah.
• April 3 - Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech.
• June 8 – James Earl Ray is arrested for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April.
• July 18 – The semiconductor company Intel is founded.
• October 2 – North Cascades National Park is established.
Worldwide
• January 15 – The 1968 Belice earthquake in Sicily kills 380 and injures around 1,000.
• February 6–18 – The 1968 Winter Olympics are held in Grenoble, France.
• March 2 – Baggeridge Colliery closes marking the end of over 300 years in the Black Country of England.
• April 18 – London Bridge is sold to U.S. entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch for reconstruction at Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
• May 13 - Paris student riots: One million march through the streets of Paris.
• June 7 – Ford sewing machinists strike for equal pay starts at the Ford Dagenham plant in London.
• July 29 – Arenal Volcano erupts in Costa Rica for the first time in centuries.
• September 6 – Swaziland (later known as Eswatini) becomes independent of the United Kingdom.
• October 12–27 – The 1968 Summer Olympics are held in Mexico City, Mexico.
• November 8 – The Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals is signed and ratified.