Centuries: Year in Review 20th Century (19th century - 20th century - 21st century)
Decades: 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s - 1970s - 1980s 1990s 2000s
Years: 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 - 1976 - 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981
Births
- February 11 - Brice Beckham, actor.
- September 7 - Shannon Elizabeth, actress.
- Judit Polgar, best woman chess player in history.
Deaths
- January 30 - Mance Lipscomb, popular singer.
- January - Zhou Enlai, prime minister of China, of cancer
- February 11 - Lee J Cobb, actor.
- February 11 - Alice Allen, actress.
- February 11 - Charlie Naughton, actor.
- Mao Zedong, Chinese leader
- Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction commits suicide
- August 4 - First outbreak of Legionaire's disease kills 29 at the American Legion convention in Philadelphia
- September 21 - Orlando Letelier assasinated in Washington, D.C. by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
- Werner Karl Heisenberg, physicist
- Paul Robeson, American actor, singer, writer and political and civil rights activist.
- Martin Heidegger, German philosopher
- Bernard Montgomery, British field marshal
Events
- February 11 - Clifford Alexander Jr is confirmed as 1st African-American Secretary of US Army.
- February 24 - Cuba's current constitution enacted.
- April 1 - Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
- May 11 - President Gerald Ford signs Federal Election Campaign Act
- April 25 - Portugal's new constitution enacted
- June 6 - Soweto riots in South Africa mark the beginning of the end of apartheid
- July 3 - United States Supreme Court rules that death penalty is not inherently cruel or unusual and is a constitutionally acceptable form of punishment
- July 4 - American bicentennial
- July 4 - Israeli airborne commandos attack Uganda's Entebbe Airport and free 103 hostages being held by pro-Palestinian hijackers of an Air France plane; one Israeli and several Ugandan soldiers are killed in raid
- July 20 - Viking 1 Lander lands on Mars
- September 3 - Viking 2 Lander lands on Mars
- Summer Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada
- Military Junta in power in Argentina.
- September 17 - Space Shuttle Enterprise rolled out
- September 21 - Seychelles joins the United Nations
- November 2 - Jimmy Carter elected U.S. president
- December 1 - Angola joins the United Nations
- December 15 - Samoa joins the United Nations
- First laser printer introduced by IBM - the IBM 3800
- Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, invented by Seymour Cray
- California's sodomy law repealled.
- The term memetics first proposed by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.
- Toronto Blue Jays created
- Copyright Act of 1976 extends copyright duration for an additional 20 years
- Diffie-Hellman cryptography proposed
Sport
- January 18 - Super Bowl X Pittsburgh Steelers (21) def. Dallas Cowboys (17)
- Physics - Burton Richter, Samuel Chao Chung Ting
- Chemistry - William N Lipscomb
- Medicine - Baruch S Blumberg, D Carleton Gajdusek
- Literature - Saul Bellow
- Peace - Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan
- Economics - Milton Friedman