Americans mourned the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and people marched in protest of the Vietnam War. This occasional series looks at how these and other events of 1968 continue to reverberate 40 years later.
November 4, 2008 · While Rep. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman to win a seat in Congress, a long line of black women have followed in her footsteps. Here's a list of the black women who have served on Capitol Hill in the past 40 years.
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November 4, 2008 · Shirley Chisholm is often remembered as the first black woman to run for president. But before she went for the top spot, the former educator had already made history: Forty years ago this week, she won a seat in the mostly male, mostly white House of Representatives.
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October 31, 2008 · On Oct. 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a halt in bombing missions over Vietnam, implementing Gen. Creighton Abrams' "clear and hold" strategy. Today that counterinsurgency strategy is showing some promise in Iraq.
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September 5, 2008 · Think the feminists who protested the 1968 Miss America pageant in the name of women's liberation burned their bras? Think again. No bras were set aflame that September day. But the idea that they were helped launch the movement onto the national stage.
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September 1, 2008 · Forty years ago, the best picture nominees signaled a stirring in Hollywood — an appetite for revolutionary realism, socially conscious stories and movies targeted at the long-ignored youth audience.Web Extra: Watch Clips From the Nominees
()August 25, 2008 · Many Democrats saw the unruly 1968 convention in Chicago as one of the reasons they lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon that year. That defeat and a landslide loss four years later led the Democrats to change the way they approached conventions.
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August 23, 2008 · Democrats are gathering for their national convention in Denver with the party divided and the country mired in an unpopular war. The situation was similar 40 years ago when Democrats convened in Chicago, amid battles between protesters and police. What happened then still influences political protests today.Web Extra: View a Photo Gallery
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August 24, 2008 · The lessons Richard M. Daley learned from his father's missteps during the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention helped him claim — and hold — the seat behind the Chicago mayor's desk where his father served for 21 years.Web Extra: View a Photo Gallery
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August 22, 2008 · Tourists in the Czech Republic are not likely to find a plaque commemorating the failed democratization process known as Prague Spring and the generation of 1968. Critics say people want to forget there was a period of communism in Prague.
()August 21, 2008 · Called "socialism with a human face," the Czechoslovak Communist Party's embrace of democratic reforms led the Soviets to invade that country in 1968 and squash the movement, fearing it would poison other Warsaw Pact countries. Today, little note is given to the movement or the invasion.
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August 21, 2008 · An attempt to mesh democracy and communism in Czechoslovakia by introducing free speech and freedom of assembly was squashed when Soviet officials invaded the country on Aug. 21, 1968.
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July 23, 2008 · Janis Ian wrote "Society's Child," a song about an interracial couple in the 1960s, when she was 15 years old, a song that she says everyone hated her for. In a new memoir, Ian recounts her life as an activist and musician.Web Extra: Read An Excerpt, Hear The Music
()June 30, 2008 · Earl Warren served as U.S. chief justice through much of the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the court made landmark civil rights decisions and other rulings with wide-ranging social importance. Warren's retirement came 40 years ago this month.
()June 23, 2008 · Forty years ago, there were protests in many European countries. But perhaps the longest and most complex movement was in Italy. During the battle of Valle Giulia, the meadow in front of Rome University's school of architecture, some 4,000 students confronted police. By early 1968, most Italian universities were occupied.
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June 21, 2008 · Documentary photographer Jill Freedman recounts her experience living among demonstrators in the mud and rain during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C.
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