The 50th Anniversary to Worry About Now
Not 1968, awful as that was, but 1969, when with few notable exceptions the body of American life so scarred by recent events proceeded to shed much of its skin and begin creating a new identity with little or no regard for or allegiance to the past.
—It ‘s a time of many beginnings: Wendy’s, Long John Silver’s, Arthur Treacher’s, Walmart, Scooby Doo, the Brady Bunch, Sesame Street, Monty Python, Led Zeppelin, the supersonic Concorde, the jumbo jet 747, the first X rated film to win an Oscar, new movie superstars like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight, the election of Golda Meir as Israel’s first female premier, the attainment of power by Yassir Arafat and Muhammar Khaddafi, early chain rattlings inside Iran…
—As well as endings galore: The Beatles breakup, the death of President and WWII Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower, the death of Ho ChinMinh, the death of Mary Jo Kopechnemand Kennedy dreams of another presidency, the death of Brian Jones, founding member of The Rolling Stones, Jack Kerouac, Judy Garland, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, the LaBiancas, Mies van der Rohe, Jeffrey Hunter, John L. Lewis, Rocky Marciano, Robert Taylor, Max Eastman, Eric Portman, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and many more…
—And most signicantly, perhaps, ominous hints of the new life-changing American world awaiting us in every sphere: the mud and libertinism of Woodstock, the Hell’s Angels killing a fan at Altamont (“the end of the sixties” it was called), the beginning of the draft lottery system, the National Guard arresting student protesters in North Dakota, the first U.S. case and death in the AIDS crisis, the beginning of the gay rights movement, the birth of rights groups for Native Americans and their seizure and occupation of Alcatraz Island, the first senate refusal to confirm a SCOTUS nominee since 1930, the arrest for indecent exposure onstage by Doors frontman Jim Morrison, the trial, conviction and public anguish over Lt.. Calley and the My Lai Massacre, the unprecedented murder spree of Charles Manson’s hippie-girl murder cult, the trials and convictions of James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, the nationwide Vietnam War Moratorium by ordinary citizens, black players protesting their head coach by wearing black armbands to his office, on the heels of an oil spill the birth of an extreme ecology movement as a political force that spawned Earth Day, the violent occupation of university buildings by students at Harvard, the Weathermen bombings, the controversial shootings of Black Panthers in Chicago, the arrival of Gloria Steinem as a feminist force standing on the shoulders of the Black Power Movement, the specification of the Unix Operating System, the baby steps of Internet precursor ARPA, invention of the digital camera chip that will lead all the way to smartphones, and more of course…
It’s all here, the elevation of youth over experience, the blossoming of victim-oriented rights groups, recurrence of the age old curse of deadly physical violence in American politics, the many byproducts of drugs and untrammeled promiscuity, and the media celebration of a runaway counterculture that in a trice becomes THE Culture. The most surprising thing today might be realizing how hard it is to remember a time when all this wasn’t so. It just is that way now.
This nation and much of the rest of the world would never be the same after 1969. This is the furniture of life many of our children don’t know never existed before. More than any other year, this is the one that did the most to shape how they live now and what they still have to face in their own lives. What do you tell them about the past? There is a bit of the good old American sporting life in here if you orvthey care anymore. Willie Mays hitting his 600th career home run. The Amazing Mets winning the World Series. The Jets shocking the Colts in Super Bowl III. Amid the reliable punctuation of Ohio State winning another national collegiate football championship. And, obviously, Apollo 11 landing on the moon. If your kids still believe in the Apollo triumph. Or in the moon.
Here’s the 1969 timeline. In Part 4, we’ll talk about the year that started this line of thought. Next year. 2019. Think about it till then. Think in particular of the speed of the changes represented here. From Woodstock Nation to murder at the Stones Gimme Shelter concert at Altamont in less than six months. How fast big bad breakthroughs in behavior can come.
Click graphic for source.
THE 1969 TIMELINE, JANUARY THROUGH DECEMBER
Read it at your leisure, but please read it.
JANUARY
January 1 – Ohio State defeats USC in the Rose Bowl to win the national college football championship for the 1968 season.
January 5 –
Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London’s Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home’s occupants.
January 12 —
Led Zeppelin, the first Led Zeppelin album, is released in the United States.
Martial law is declared in Madrid, as the University is closed and over 300 students are arrested.
American football: The New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, 16-7. Joe Namath is the MVP of the game.
January 14 —
An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 27 and injures 314.
The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 4.
January 15 – The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 5, which docks with Soyuz 4 for a transfer of crew.
January 16 –
Two cosmonauts transfer from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4 via a spacewalk while the two craft are docked together, the first time such a transfer takes place. The two spacecraft undock and return to Earth two days later.
Student Jan Palach sets himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; 3 days later he dies.
January 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th President of the United States.
January 22 – An assassination attempt is carried out on Leonid Brezhnev by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured. Brezhnev escaped unharmed.
January 26 – Elvis Presley steps into American Studios in Memphis, Tennessee… beginning the recording of… landmark comeback sessions for [albums including the songs] “Suspicious Minds”, “In the Ghetto”, and “Kentucky Rain”.
January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara’s harbor. The incident will inspire Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson [and Ira Einhorn] to organize the first Earth Day in 1970.
January 31 – The Beatles give their last public performance, of several tracks on the roof of Apple Records, London (featured in Let It Be (1970 film)).
FEBRUARY
February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
February 5 – The controversial television show Turn-On premieres on the ABC network in the United States and is canceled after one episode following protests by viewers and ABC affiliate stations.
February 8 — After 147 years, the last weekly issue of The Saturday Evening Post is published. The magazine is later resurrected, briefly, as a monthly magazine.
February 9 – The Boeing 747 “jumbo jet” is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington.
February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange.
February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues Mysterii Paschalis, a motu proprio, deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day).
February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California.
February 24
The Mariner 6 Mars probe is launched from the United States.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to public schools.
MARCH
March 2 — In Toulouse, France the first Concorde test flight is conducted.
Soviet and Chinese forces clash at a border outpost on the Ussuri River.
March 3 —
Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 (James McDivitt, David Scott, Rusty Schweickart) to test the lunar module.
In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The United States Navy establishes the Navy Fighter Weapons School (also known as Top Gun) at Naval Air Station Miramar.
March 4 – Arrest warrants are issued by a Florida court for Jim Morrison on charges of indecent exposure during a Doors concert three days earlier.
March 10 —
In Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. (he later retracts his guilty plea).
The novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo is first distributed to booksellers by the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
March 13 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
March 17 —
Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.
March 18 – Operation Breakfast, the covert bombing of Cambodia by U.S. planes, begins.
March 19 —
John Lennon and Yoko Ono are married at Gibraltar, and proceed to their honeymoon “Bed-In” for peace in Amsterdam.
March 28 – Pope Paul VI increases the number of Roman Catholic cardinals by one-third, from 101 to 134.
March 30 – The body of former United States General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower is brought by caisson to the United States Capitol to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda; Eisenhower had died two days earlier, after a long illness, in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
APRIL
April 1 – The Hawker Siddeley Harrier [vertical takeoff and landing] enters service with the Royal Air Force.
April 4 – Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.
April 8 – The Montreal Expos debut as Major League Baseball’s first team outside the United States.
April 9 —
The Harvard University Administration Building is seized by close to 300 students, mostly members of the Students for a Democratic Society. Before the takeover ends, 45 will be injured and 184 arrested.
April 15 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down the aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
April 20 —
British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
A grassroots movement of Berkeley community members seizes an empty lot owned by the University of California, to begin the formation of “People’s Park”.
April 28 – Charles de Gaulle steps down as president of France after suffering defeat in a referendum the day before.
MAY
May 10 — Zip to Zap, a gathering of more than 2,000 people students and young adults at the remote town of at Zap, North Dakota, ends with the dispersal and eviction of the revelers by the North Dakota National Guard.
The Battle of Dong Ap Bia, also known as Hamburger Hill, begins during the Vietnam War.
May 15 – An American teenager known as ‘Robert R.’ dies in St. Louis, Missouri, of a baffling medical condition. In 1984 it will be identified as the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America.
May 16 – Venera program: Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
May 17 – Venera program: Soviet probe Venera 6 begins to descend into Venus’s atmosphere, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by pressure.
May 18 – Apollo program: Apollo 10 (Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, John Young) is launched as a full rehearsal for the Moon landing, but stops 15 kilometers short of actually reaching the lunar surface.
May 20 – United States National Guard helicopters spray skin-stinging powder on anti-war protesters in California.
May 22 – Apollo program: Apollo 10’s lunar module flies to within 15,400 m of the Moon’s surface.
May 25 – Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated, Oscar-winning John Schlesinger film, is released.
May 26 — Apollo program: Apollo 10 returns to Earth, after a successful 8-day test of all the components needed for the upcoming first manned Moon landing.
May 26–June 2 – John Lennon and Yoko Ono conduct their second Bed-In. The follow-up to the Amsterdam event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Lennon composes and records the song Give Peace a Chance during the Bed-In.
JUNE
June 3 – While operating at sea on SEATO maneuvers, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne accidentally rams and slices into the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea, killing 74 American seamen.
June 5 – An international communist conference begins in Moscow.
June 7 – The rock group Blind Faith plays its first gig in front of 100,000 people in London’s Hyde Park.
June 8 – Francisco Franco orders the closing of the Gibraltar–Spain border and communications between Gibraltar and Spain in response to the 1967 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum.
June 8 – U.S. President Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu meet at Midway Island. Nixon announces that 25,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn by September.
June 15 – Georges Pompidou is elected President of France.
June 18–22 – The National Convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, held in Chicago, collapses, and the Weatherman faction seizes control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any activity run from the National Office or bearing the name of SDS is Weatherman-controlled.
June 22 —The Cuyahoga River fire helps spur an avalanche of water pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Judy Garland dies of a drug overdose in her London home.
June 23 – Warren E. Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States by retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren.
June 24 – The United Kingdom and Rhodesia sever diplomatic ties, after Rhodesian constitutional referendum.
June 28 – The Stonewall riots in New York City mark the start of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S.
JULY
July 1 – Charles, Prince of Wales, is invested with his title at Caernarfon.
July 3 – Brian Jones, musician and founder of The Rolling Stones, drowns in his swimming pool at his home in Sussex, England.
July 7 – French is made equal to English throughout the Canadian national government.
July 8 – Vietnam War: The very first U.S. troop withdrawals are made.
July 14 — The Act of Free Choice commences in Merauke, West Iran.
The United States’ $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are officially withdrawn from circulation.
July 16 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins) lifts off toward the first landing on the Moon.
July 18 – Chappaquiddick incident – Edward M. Kennedy drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign aide to his brother, dies in the early morning hours of July 19 in the submerged car.
July 20 – Apollo program: The lunar module Eagle/Apollo 11 lands on the lunar surface. An estimated 500 million people worldwide watch in awe as Neil Armstrong takes his historic first steps on the Moon at 10:56 pm ET (02:56 UTC July 21), the largest television audience for a live broadcast at that time.[8][9]
July 22 – Spanish dictator and head of state Francisco Franco appoints Prince Juan Carlos his successor.
July 24 — The Apollo 11 astronauts return from the first successful Moon landing, and are placed in biological isolation for several days, on the chance they may have brought back lunar germs. The airless lunar environment is later determined to preclude microscopic life.
July 25 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expects its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense. This starts the “Vietnamization” of the war.
July 26 – The New York Chapter of the Young Lords is founded.
July 30 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon makes an unscheduled visit to South Vietnam, meeting with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. military commanders.
AUGUST
August 4 – Vietnam War: At the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy begin secret peace negotiations. They eventually fail since both sides cannot agree to any terms.
August 8 — The Beatles at 11:30 have photographer Iain Macmillan take their photo on a zebra crossing on Abbey Road.
August 9 — Members of the Manson Family invade the home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski in Los Angeles. The followers kill Tate (who was 8 months pregnant), and her friends: Folgers coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring. Also killed is Steven Parent, leaving from a visit to the Polanski’s caretaker. More than 100 stab wounds are found on the victims, except for Parent, who had been shot almost as soon as the Manson Family entered the property.
August 10 – The Manson Family kills Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, wealthy Los Angeles businessman and his wife.
August 13 – Serious border clashes occur between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
August 14 – British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland following the three-day Battle of the Bogside.
August 15–18 – The Woodstock Festival is held in upstate New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era. [Event came to be known as Woodstock Nation]
August 17 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille, the most powerful tropical cyclonic system at landfall in history, hits the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 dollars).
August 21 — Strong violence on demonstration in Prague and Brno, Czechoslovakia. Military force contra citizens. ‘Prague Spring’ finally beaten.
August 29 – A Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv is hijacked and diverted to Syria.
SEPTEMBER
September 1 – 1969 Libyan coup d’état: A bloodless coup in Libya ousts King Idris, and brings Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power.
September 2 — The first automatic teller machine in the United States is installed in Rockville Centre, New York.
Ho Chi Minh, former president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, dies.
September 5 – Lieutenant William Calley is charged with six counts of premeditated murder, for the 1968 My Lai Massacre deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.
September 9 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 853 DC-9 collides in flight with a Piper PA-28, and crashes near Fairland, Indiana, killing all 83 persons in both aircraft.
September 13 – Scooby-Doo airs its first episode on the CBS network in the United States.
September 14 – The US Selective Service selects September 14 as the First Draft Lottery date.
September 20 — At a meeting between The Beatles (minus George Harrison) and business manager Allen Klein, John Lennon announces his intention to quit the group.
The very last theatrical Warner Bros. cartoon is released: the Merrie Melodies short Injun Trouble.
September 22 – San Francisco Giant Willie Mays becomes the first player since Babe Ruth to hit 600 career home runs.
September 22–25 – An Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco, following the al-Aqsa Mosque fire (August 21), condemns the Israeli claim of ownership of Jerusalem.
September 23 — China carries out an underground nuclear bomb test.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford) opens to limited release in the United States.
September 24 – The Chicago Eight trial begins in Chicago, Illinois.
September 25 – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded.
September 26 —‘The Beatles release their Abbey Road album which is an enormous commercial success and, although receiving mixed reviews at this time, comes to be viewed by many as the group’s best.
The Brady Bunch is broadcast for the first time on ABC.
OCTOBER
October 1 —‘In Sweden, Olof Palme is elected Leader of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party, replacing Tage Erlander as Prime Minister on October 14.
The Beijing Subway begins operation.
October 2 – A 1.2 megaton thermonuclear device is tested at Amchitka Island, Alaska. This test is code-named Project Milrow, the 11th test of the Operation Mandrel 1969–1970 underground nuclear test series. This test is known as a “calibration shot” to test if the island is fit for larger underground nuclear detonations.
October 5 — Monty Python’s Flying Circus first airs on BBC One.
October 9–12 – ‘Days of Rage’: In Chicago, the United States National Guard is called in to control demonstrations involving the radical Weathermen, in connection with the “Chicago Eight” Trial.
October 11–16 – The New York Mets defeat the Baltimore Orioles four games to one in one of the greatest World Series upsets in baseball history.
October 15 — Vietnam War: Hundreds of thousands of people take part in Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations across the United States.
October 17 — Willard S. Boyle and George Smith invent the CCD at Bell Laboratories (30 years later, this technology is widely used in digital cameras).
Fourteen black athletes are kicked off the University of Wyoming football team for wearing black armbands into their coach’s office.
October 22 – Led Zeppelin release Led Zeppelin II to critical acclaim and commercial success.
October 29 – The first message is sent over ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.
October 31 — Wal-Mart incorporates as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
NOVEMBER
November 3 — Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon addresses the nation on television and radio, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity with the Vietnam War effort, and to support his policies. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounces the President’s critics as ‘an effete corps of impudent snobs’ and ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’.
November 7 – Pink Floyd release their Ummagumma album.
November 9 – A group of American Indians, led by Richard Oakes, seizes Alcatraz Island for 19 months, inspiring a wave of renewed Indian pride and government reform.
November 10 – Sesame Street aired its first episode on the NET network.
November 12 – Vietnam War – My Lai Massacre: Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the My Lai story.
November 14 — Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, Alan Bean), the second manned mission to the Moon.
The SS United States, the last active United States Lines passenger ship, is withdrawn from service.
November 15 — Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.
Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000–500,000 protesters stage a peaceful demonstration against the war, including a symbolic “March Against Death”.
Dave Thomas opens his first restaurant in a former steakhouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio. He names the chain Wendy’s after his 8-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou (nicknamed “Wendy” by her siblings).
November 17 – Cold War: Negotiators from the Soviet Union and the United States meet in Helsinki, to begin the SALT I negotiations aimed at limiting the number of strategic weapons on both sides.
November 19 — Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”), becoming the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
Soccer great Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
November 20 — Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Richard Oakes returns with 90 followers and offers to buy Alcatraz for $24 (he leaves the island January 1970).
November 21 — U.S. President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Satō agree in Washington, D.C. to the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. retains rights to military bases on the island, but they must be nuclear-free.
The first ARPANET link is established (the progenitor of the global Internet).
The United States Senate votes down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930.
November 22 – College Football: Michigan ends Ohio State’s 22-game winning streak with a 24-12 upset at Ann Arbor, denying the Buckeyes their second consecutive national championship.
November 24 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 spacecraft splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to the Moon.
November 25 – John Lennon returns his MBE medal to protest the British government’s involvement in the Nigerian Civil War.
DECEMBER
December 1 – Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II (on January 4, 1970, The New York Times will run a long article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random”).
December 2 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet makes its first passenger flight. It carries 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, from Seattle, to New York City.
December 4 – Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are shot dead in their sleep during a raid by 14 Chicago police officers.
December 5 – The Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed is released.
December 6 — The Altamont Free Concert is held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Hosted by The Rolling Stones, it is an attempt at a “Woodstock West” and is best known for the uproar of violence that occurred. It is viewed by many as the “end of the sixties.”
December 7 — The animated Rankin Bass Christmas special Frosty the Snowman premiers on CBS.
December 24 — Charles Manson is allowed to defend himself at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.
The oil company Phillips Petroleum made the first oil discovery in the Norwegian sector of North Sea.
December 27 – The Liberal Democratic Party wins 47.6% of the votes in the Japanese general election, 1969. Future prime ministers Yoshirō Mori and Tsutomu Hata and future kingmaker Ichirō Ozawa are elected for the first time.
December 28 – The Young Lords take over the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem.
DATE UNKNOWN
Summer – Invention of Unix under the potential name “Unics” (after Multics).[11]
Fall – International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, a maritime treaty, is adopted.
The first strain of the AIDS virus (HIV) migrates to the United States via Haiti.[12]
Women are allowed membership in the Future Farmers of America (the later National FFA Organization).
Long John Silver’s restaurant chain opens its first store in Lexington, Kentucky.
Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips is founded by S. Robert Davis and Dave Thomas and its first location in Columbus, Ohio opens for business.
Gloria Steinem publishes first major article on Women’s Rights, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”