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1971 — A Turning Point in History That Still Influences Today’s World
What happened 50 years ago?
The year 1971 was a turning point in history on many fronts. In the Vietnam war, the morale of the U.S. troops collapsed after the Battle of FSB (Fire Support Base) Mary Ann, in March, and the largest ever anti-war demonstration happened in Washington D.C. in April with about 500 000 participants. Both sealed the outcome of the war four years later.
The end of the Bretton-Woods system — international rules for financial relations, especially defining binding ranges for the currency exchange rates — began when the Federal Republic of Germany stopped the Deutschmark exchange rate fixation to the U.S. dollar, and President Nixon stopped the fixation of the U.S. dollar to gold. That led to today’s known floating exchange rate system.
On a political level, China returned to the international community when the U.S. ended its trade embargo of China, and the United Nations General Assembly admitted the People’s Republic of China as a member. China is today the second-largest economy in the world.
Technologically, Texas Instruments and Intel developed their first microprocessors and launched digitalization.
After a few fly byes, the race to Mars started with the Soviets’ Mars spacecraft…
