This Year in History:
1981
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
The so-called Yorkshire Ripper is finally caught by British police, ending one of the largest manhunts in history. For five years, investigators had pursued every lead in an effort to stop the serial killer who terrorized Northern England, but the end came out of pure happenstance. Peter Sutcliffe was spotted in a car with false […]
The oil tycoon Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) prepares to marry his former secretary, the beautiful and innocent Krystle (Linda Evans), in the three-hour television movie that kicks off the prime-time ABC soap opera Dynasty on January 12, 1981. Over the next eight years, the Carringtons, a rich Denver oil clan, and another wealthy family, the […]
On January 15, 1981, Hill Street Blues, television’s landmark cops-and-robbers drama, debuts on NBC. When the series first appeared, the police show had largely been given up for dead. Critics savaged stodgy and moralistic melodramas, and scoffed at lighter fare like Starsky and Hutch. Created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, Hill Street Blues invigorated […]
On January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as the 40th president of the United States, the 52 U.S. captives held at the U.S. embassy in Teheran, Iran, are released, ending the 444-day Iran Hostage Crisis. On November 4, 1979, the crisis began when militant Iranian students, outraged that the U.S. government had allowed […]
Ronald Reagan, former Western movie actor and host of television’s popular “Death Valley Days” is sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. More than any president since the Texas-born Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan’s public image was closely tied to the American West, although he was raised in the solidly Midwestern state of […]
A month and a half after the shocking assassination of John Lennon, on January 22, 1981, Rolling Stone magazine’s John Lennon tribute issue hits newsstands, featuring a cover photograph of a naked Lennon curled up in a fetal embrace of his fully-clothed wife Yoko Ono. The iconic Annie Leibovitz portrait would become the definitive image […]
Jiang Qing, the widow of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, is sentenced to death for her “counter-revolutionary crimes” during the Cultural Revolution. Originally an actress in Communist theater and film, her marriage to Mao in 1939 was widely criticized, as his third wife, Ho Zizhen, was a celebrated veteran of the Long March who Mao had […]
The U.S. government releases a report detailing how the “insurgency in El Salvador has been progressively transformed into a textbook case of indirect armed aggression by communist powers.” The report was another step indicating that the new administration of Ronald Reagan was prepared to take strong measures against what it perceived to be the communist […]
On February 21, 1981, Dolly Parton notches the biggest hit of her career, when the song “9 to 5” reaches #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song, a soundtrack to the movie of the same name, would cement her crossover from country music to mainstream superstardom. Parton brought the full range of her […]
On March 6, 1981, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite signs off with his trademark valediction, “And that’s the way it is,” for the final time. Over the previous 19 years, Cronkite had established himself not only as the nation’s leading newsman but as “the most trusted man in America,” a steady presence during two […]
A nuclear accident at a Japan Atomic Power Company plant in Tsuruga, Japan, exposes 59 workers to radiation on March 8, 1981. The officials in charge failed to timely inform the public and nearby residents, endangering them. Tsuruga lies near Wakasa Bay on the west coast of Japan. Approximately 60,000 people lived in the area […]
On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by a drifter named John Hinckley Jr. The president had just finished addressing a labor meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel and was walking with his entourage to his limousine when Hinckley, standing among a group of reporters, […]
The space shuttle Columbia is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, becoming the first reusable manned spacecraft to travel into space. Piloted by astronauts Robert L. Crippen and John W. Young, the Columbia undertook a 54-hour space flight of 36 orbits before successfully touching down at California’s Edwards Air Force Base on April 14. On September […]
On May 5, 1981, imprisoned Irish-Catholic militant Bobby Sands dies after refusing food for 66 days in protest of his treatment as a criminal rather than a political prisoner by British authorities. His death immediately touched off widespread rioting in Belfast, as young Irish-Catholic militants clashed with police and British Army patrols and started fires. […]
On May 11, 1981, Bob Marley, the soul and international face of reggae music, died in a Miami, Florida, hospital. He was 36 years old. In what would prove to be the next to the last concert of his tragically short life, Bob Marley shared the bill at Madison Square Garden with the hugely popular […]
Near the start of his weekly general audience in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II is shot and seriously wounded while passing through the square in an open car. The assailant, 23-year-old escaped Turkish murderer Mehmet Ali Agca, fired four shots, one of which hit the pontiff in the abdomen, narrowly missing vital […]
On May 22, 1981, police staking out a bridge over the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta, Georgia, hear a loud splash, and begin chasing Wayne Williams as he attempts to drive away in a station wagon. After questioning him about his involvement in the unprecedented string of child murders in Atlanta over the two previous years, […]
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing five cases of a rare lung infection, PCP, in young, otherwise healthy gay men in Los Angeles. It was unknown at the time, but the article is describing the effects of AIDS. Today, […]
More than 500 passengers are killed when their train plunges into the Bagmati River in India on June 6, 1981. The rail accident—the worst in India to that date—was believed to have been caused when an engineer tried to avoid striking a cow. The nine-car train, filled with approximately 1,000 passengers, was traveling through the […]
Not so much a band as an audacious business plan, a group called Stars on 45 climbs all the way to the top of the U.S. pop charts on June 20, 1981, with a single whose impossibly long title takes almost as long to read as the song itself takes to play: “Medley: Intro ‘Venus’/Sugar […]
