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Top Song(s)
• Don McLean - American Pie
• Harry Nilsson - Without You
• Hot Butter - Popcorn
• Daniel Boone - Beautiful Sunday
• Neil Young - Heart of Gold
Top Film(s)
• The Godfather
• Aguirre: The Wrath of God
• Solaris
• Cries and Whispers
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Best Selling Book(s)
• Watership Down - Richard Adams
• Frog and Toad Together - Arnold Lobel
• All Creatures Great and Small - James Herriot
• The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
• The Odessa File - Frederick Forsyth
Famous Deaths
• January 30 - Prince Sisowath Watchayavong, 5th Prime Minister of Cambodia
• February 20 - Maria Goeppert Mayer, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• March 28 – Joseph Paul-Boncour, 71st Prime Minister of France
• May 2 – J. Edgar Hoover, American civil servant, 1st Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• June 13 - Georg von Bekesy, Hungarian biophysicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• July 5 – Raul Leoni, 55th President of Venezuela
• August 20 – Juan Manuel Galvez, 39th President of Honduras
• September 1 – He Xiangning, Chinese revolutionary, feminist, politician, painter and poet
• September 15 - Asgeir Asgeirsson, 2nd President of Iceland
• December 1 – Antonio Segni, 34th Prime Minister of Italy and 4th President of the Italian Republic
Medical/Science/Technology
• The United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
• Launch of Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
• S. J. Singer and Garth L. Nicolson describe the fluid mosaic model of the functional cell membrane.
• Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould publish their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium.
• Socorro doves (Zenaida graysoni) last seen in the wild.
• First C compiler released.
• Atari release the production version of Pong, one of the first video games.
• Harvey J. Alter identifies the presence of hepatitis C virus.
• The last major epidemic of smallpox in Europe breaks out in Yugoslavia.
• Tu Youyou and collaborators obtain a pure extract of the antiplasmodial drug artemisinin.
Political
• January 5 – U.S. President Richard Nixon orders the development of a Space Shuttle program.
• January 25 – Shirley Chisholm, the first African American Congresswoman, announces her candidacy for president.
• February 18 – The California Supreme Court voids the state's death penalty, commuting all death sentences to life in prison.
• February 21–28 – President Richard Nixon makes an unprecedented visit to China and meets with Mao Zedong.
• March 22 – The 92nd U.S. Congress votes to send the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification.
• April 10 - The U.S. and the Soviet Union join some 70 nations in signing the Biological Weapons Convention.
• May 8 – U.S. President Richard Nixon orders the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam.
• May 26 - Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT I treaty in Moscow, as well as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
• June 28 – U.S. President Richard Nixon announces that no new draftees will be sent to Vietnam.
• June 29 – The Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is unconstitutional, converting all death sentences to life imprisonment.
National
• January 17 - Section of Memphis' Highway 51 South renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard.
• February 15 – Phonorecords are granted U.S. federal copyright protection for the first time.
• February 26 – A coal sludge spill kills 125 people in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia.
• April 17 – The first Boston Marathon in which women are officially allowed to compete.
• May 2 – A fire in the Sunshine Mine in northern Idaho kills 91.
• June 3 – Sally Priesand becomes the first female rabbi in the U.S.
• July 14 - Jean Westwood is 1st woman chosen to head Democratic National Committee.
• July 27 - The F-15 Eagle flies for the first time.
• August 13–18 – The Special Olympics World Games take place in Los Angeles.
• October 30 - Worst US rail accident in 14 years; 45 die in Chicago, Illinois.
Worldwide
• January 11 – Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declares a new constitutional government in Bangladesh, with himself as president.
• February 17 – Volkswagen Beetle sales exceed those of the Ford Model T when the 15,007,034th Beetle is produced.
• March 19 – India and Bangladesh sign the Indo-Bangladeshi Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Peace.
• May 5 – An Alitalia DC-8 crashes west of Palermo, Sicily; 115 die.
• June 14 – Japan Airlines Flight 471 crashes outside New Delhi airport, killing 82 of 87 occupants.
• June 16 – 108 die as two passenger trains hit the debris of a collapsed railway tunnel near Soissons, France.
• July 18 – Anwar Sadat expels 20,000 Soviet advisors from Egypt.
• August 14 – An East German Ilyushin airliner crashes near East Berlin; all 156 on board perish.
• October 5 – The United Reformed Church in England is founded out of the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches.
• December 15 - The Commonwealth of Australia ordains equal pay for women.