RETURN TO INDEX
Top Song(s)
• Stevie Wonder - I Just Called to Say I Love You
• George Michael - Careless Whisper
• Prince - When Doves Cry
• Tina Turner - What's Love Got to Do With It?
• Cyndi Lauper - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Top Film(s)
• Ghostbusters
• The Terminator
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• Paris, Texas
• Amadeus
Best Selling Book(s)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy
• Neuromancer - William Gibson
• The Talisman - Stephen King
• In the Hand of the Goddess - Tamora Pierce
Famous Deaths
• January 7 – Alfred Kastler, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• January 9 – Sir Deighton Lisle Ward, 4th Governor-General of Barbados
• March 14 – Aurelio Peccei, Italian industrialist and philanthropist, co-founder of the Club of Rome
• April 12 – Edward Sokoine, 2nd Prime Minister of Tanzania
• April 20 – Otto Arosemena, 32nd President of Ecuador
• June 5 – Ahmad Fuad Mohieddin, 42nd Prime Minister of Egypt
• August 28 – Mohammed Naguib, 30th Prime Minister of Egypt and 1st President of Egypt
• September 5 - Adam Malik, 3rd Vice President of Indonesia
• October 14 – Sir Martin Ryle, English radio astronomer, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics
• November 11 – Martin Luther King Sr., American Baptist pastor, missionary, and figure in the civil rights movement
Medical/Science/Technology
• Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered space walk.
• First known case of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in England.
• Danish physiologist Steen Willadsen first successfully uses cells from embryos to clone a sheep.
• Peter Kramer and Dan Shechtman publish their discoveries of what will soon afterwards be named quasicrystals.
• Apple Computer places the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States.
• The first edition of language documentation Common Lisp the Language is published in the United States.
• The fossil skeleton of the hominid "Turkana Boy" is discovered in Kenya.
• Dr. John Buster and team announce history's first embryo transfer from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.
• Dr. Robert Gallo and Margaret Heckler announce the discovery of HTLV-III as the virus that causes AIDS.
• Barbara H. Bowman and Oliver Smithies show that variations in haptoglobins are due to genetic polymorphisms.
Political
• January 3 – President Ronald Reagan meets with Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman and the Reverend Jesse Jackson at the White House.
• January 10 – The United States and the Vatican re-establish full diplomatic relations.
• January 25 – President Ronald Reagan announces that the U.S. will begin development of a permanently crewed space station.
• April 4 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan calls for an international ban on chemical weapons.
• June 3 – Ronald Reagan visits his ancestral home in Ballyporeen, the Republic of Ireland.
• October 7 – Barbara Walters hosts the first presidential debate between Walter Mondale and President Reagan in Kentucky.
• October 11 - Geraldine Ferraro and George H. W. Bush participate in the 1984 vice presidential debate.
• October 21 – The final presidential debate of the 1984 election takes place in Kansas.
• November 6 – Ronald Reagan defeats Walter F. Mondale with 59% of the popular vote.
• November 28 – Over 250 years after death, William Penn and his wife Hannah, are made Honorary Citizens of the U.S.
National
• January 27 – Michael Jackson's hair catches fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial.
• February 11 – STS-41-B: Space Shuttle Challenger makes the first shuttle landing at the Kennedy Space Center.
• May 8 - The Soviet Union announces that it will boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.
• May 12 – The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, a World's fair, opens in New Orleans.
• July 18 - Beverly Burns becomes the first female Boeing 747 captain in the world.
• September 5 – STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery lands after its maiden voyage.
• September 10 – Jeopardy! begins its syndicated version, with host Alex Trebek.
• October 2 – John Schnatter opens the first Papa John's Pizza in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
• November 2 – Velma Barfield becomes the first woman executed in the United States since 1965, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
• December 8 – White supremacist leader Robert Jay Mathews is killed in a gun battle during an FBI siege on Whidbey Island.
Worldwide
• January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• February 8–19 – The 1984 Winter Olympics are held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.
• April 2 – Indian Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma is launched into space, aboard the Soyuz T-11.
• May 23 – A methane gas explosion at Abbeystead water treatment works in Lancashire, UK, kills 16 people.
• June 30 – John Turner becomes the 17th Prime Minister of Canada.
• July 25 – Salyut 7: cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.
• August 4 - The African republic Upper Volta changes its name to Burkina Faso.
• September 18 – Joe Kittinger becomes the first person to cross the Atlantic, solo, in a hot air balloon.
• October 31 – Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her two Sikh security guards in New Delhi
• November 21 – Start of Operation Moses, the evacuation of refugee Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel via Brussels.