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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. The National Archives and Records Administration stated: "The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most significant statutory change in the relationship between the federal and state governments in the area of voting since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War".

The act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits state and local government from imposing any voting rule that "results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color" or membership in a language minority group. Other general provisions specifically outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities. The act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibited certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without first receiving confirmation from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities. Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials. ( Full article...)

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Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969. It is the last album the group recorded, although Let It Be was the last album completed before the band's break-up in April 1970. It was mostly recorded in April, July, and August 1969, and topped the record charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom. A double A-side single from the album, " Something" / " Come Together", was released in October, which also topped the charts in the US.

Abbey Road incorporates styles such as rock, pop, blues, and progressive rock, and makes prominent use of the Moog synthesiser and guitar played through a Leslie speaker unit. It is also notable for having a long medley of songs on side two that have subsequently been covered as one suite by other notable artists. The album was recorded in a more collegial atmosphere than the Get Back / Let It Be sessions earlier in the year, but there were still significant confrontations within the band, particularly over Paul McCartney's song " Maxwell's Silver Hammer", and John Lennon did not perform on several tracks. By the time the album was released, Lennon had left the group, though this was not publicly announced until McCartney also quit the following year. ( Full article...)

Credit: Warren K. Leffler

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• ... that The Beatles (pictured) had 17 number-one singles during the 1960s in the United Kingdom?
• ... that The Rolling Stones and The Who were among the many leading rock bands who emerged from the British rhythm and blues scene of the early 1960s?
• ... that long-haired males were persecuted by the Czechoslovak communist regime in the 1960s and '70s?

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John Herschel Glenn Jr. (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was an American Marine Corps aviator, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space, and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. Following his retirement from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a U.S. Senator from Ohio; in 1998, he flew into space again at the age of 77.

Before joining NASA, Glenn was a distinguished fighter pilot in World War II, the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War. He shot down three MiG-15s, and was awarded six Distinguished Flying Crosses and eighteen Air Medals. In 1957, he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight across the United States. His on-board camera took the first continuous, panoramic photograph of the United States. ( Full article...)

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Stanley Kubrick ( /ˈkuːbrɪk/; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American filmmaker and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films were nearly all adaptations of novels or short stories, spanning a number of genres and gaining recognition for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design, and dark humor.

Born and raised in New York City, Kubrick was an average school student but displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age; he began to teach himself all aspects of film producing and directing after graduating from high school. After working as a photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began making low-budget short films and made his first major Hollywood film, The Killing, for United Artists in 1956. This was followed by two collaborations with Kirk Douglas: the anti-war film Paths of Glory (1957) and the historical epic film Spartacus (1960). ( Full article...)

The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis ( Spanish: Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis ( Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.

In 1961, the US government put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles, which the CIA led in an attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow its government. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a violent campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s. The Soviet administration was concerned about a Cuban drift towards China, with which the Soviets had an increasingly fractious relationship. In response to these factors, the Soviet and Cuban governments agreed to place nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter a future invasion. An agreement was reached during a meeting between Khrushchev and Castro in July 1962, and construction started later that summer. ( Full article...)

• ... that Mily Treviño-Sauceda, the co-founder of the first national grassroots women's farmworker organization in the United States, the National Alliance of Farmworker Women, was a child farmworker in the 1960s?
• ... that in the 1960s Kléber Dupuy campaigned to rehabilitate the reputation of Philippe Pétain, against whose Vichy regime he had fought as a member of the French Resistance?
• ... that American teenagers of the 1960s and 1970s used to chat and arrange dates over the sound of the busy signal?
• ... that in the 1960s one could have tea and toast served to your changing room at the Carlisle Turkish baths in England?
• ... that Indian women's hockey player Elvera Britto and her sisters would stitch their own team uniforms while playing in the 1960s?
• ... that thousands of Greenlandic women and girls had intrauterine devices placed without their consent during the 1960s and 1970s?