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Top Song(s)
• George Harrison - My Sweet Lord
• John Lennon - Imagine
• Rod Stewart - Maggie May
• Three Dog Night - Joy to the World
• The Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar
Top Film(s)
• A Clockwork Orange
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
• The French Connection
• The Last Picture Show
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Best Selling Book(s)
• The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
• The Winds of War - Herman Wouk
• The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
• The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Lorax - Dr. Seuss
Famous Deaths
• January 27 – Jacobo Arbenz, 19th President of Guatemala
• February 4 – Brock Chisholm, Canadian physician, 1st Director-General of World Health Organization
• March 11 - Philo T. Farnsworth, American television pioneer
• April 21 - Francois Duvalier, 32nd President of Haiti
• May 28 - Audie Murphy, American World War II hero and actor
• June 25 – John Boyd Orr, 1st Baron Boyd-Orr, Scottish physician and biologist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• August 13 - W. O. Bentley, English engineer and entrepreneur
• September 21 – Bernardo Houssay, Argentine physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
• November 1 – Gertrud von Le Fort, German writer of novels, poems and essays
• December 30 - Jo Cals, Dutch politician and jurist, Prime Minister of the Netherlands
Medical/Science/Technology
• Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third crewed Moon landing.
• John O'Keefe discovers place cells in the mammalian brain.
• November 3 – The Unix Programmer's Manual is published.
• The earliest floppy disks, 8 inches in diameter, become commercially available.
• Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture.
• Godfrey Hounsfield's invention, X-ray computed tomography, is first used on a patient with a cerebral cyst.
• Smallpox is eradicated from the Americas.
• Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves in the U.S.
• Stanford prison experiment.
• Paris Descartes University begins to function in the medical department of the University of Paris.
Political
• January 1 – The Uniform Monday Holiday Act takes effect.
• January 8 - Voyageurs National Park is established.
• February 11 – The US, UK, USSR and others sign the Seabed Treaty.
• June 17 – Representatives of Japan and the United States sign the Okinawa Reversion Agreement.
• July 1 – The Postal Reorganization Act goes into effect.
• July 5 – The Twenty-sixth Amendment is formally certified by President Richard Nixon.
• October 18 – In New York City, the Knapp Commission begins public hearings on police corruption.
• October 21 – U.S. President Richard Nixon nominates Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. and William H. Rehnquist to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• November 12 - President Richard Nixon sets February 1, 1972, as the deadline for the removal of another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam.
• December 8 – President Richard Nixon orders the 7th Fleet to move towards the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean.
National
• January 31 – Apollo 14 lifts off on the third successful lunar landing mission.
• February 9 - Satchel Paige becomes the first Negro league player to become voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• March 1 – A bomb explodes in the men's room at the U.S. Capitol; the Weather Underground organization claims responsibility.
• April 10 – Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia opens.
• May 1 – Amtrak begins inter-city rail passenger service in the United States.
• June 13 – The New York Times begins to publish the Pentagon Papers.
• August 11 – Construction begins on the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
• September 9–13 – Attica Prison riots: A revolt breaks out at the maximum-security prison in Attica, New York.
• October 1 – Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, Florida.
• November 6 – Operation Grommet: The U.S. tests a thermonuclear warhead at Amchitka Island in Alaska.
Worldwide
• January 2 – 66 people are killed and over 200 injured during a crush in Glasgow, Scotland.
• February 15 – Decimal Day: The United Kingdom and Ireland both switch to decimal currency.
• March 7 - The British postal workers' strike, led by UPW General Secretary Tom Jackson, ends after 47 days.
• April 1 – The United Kingdom lifts all restrictions on gold ownership.
• May 6 – The government of Ceylon begins a major offensive against the People's Liberation Front.
• July 9 – The United Kingdom increases the number of its troops in Northern Ireland to 11,000.
• August 9 - India signs a 20-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.
• September 29 – A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, in the Indian state of Orissa, kills 10,000.
• October 27 – The Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire.
• December 18 - The world's largest hydroelectric plant in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union, begins operations.