Time Magazine's 80 Days That Changed the World

<a href="http://www.time.com/time/80days/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.time.com/time/80days/index.html</a>
From their newest issue, one day for each year they've been around (almost, some years seem to get skipped while others get two):

Oct 29 1923: Ataturk becomes President of Turkey
Nov 8 1923: Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch
Jan 1 1924: Lenin's death
Sep 25 1926: 40-hour work week
May 21, 1927: Lindbergh
Oct 6 1927: The Jazz Singer
Sep 3 1928: Alexander Flemming and penecillin
Nov 18 1928: Debut of Mickey Mouse
Oct 29 1929: Stock market crash
Mar 12 1930: Gandhi's march
Mar 4 1933: The New Deal
Jul 1 1934: The Hays Board
Jun 10 1935: Birth of AA
Aug 9 1936: Jesse Owens
Mar 3 1938: Oil in Saudi Arabia
Apr 15 1938: Debut of Superman
Nov 9 1938: the Kristalnacht
Sep 1 1939: Hitler invades Poland
May 10 1940: Churchill becomes PM
Dec 7 1941: Duh
Jun 6 1944: Duh again
Aug 6 1945: Hiroshima
Apr 15 1947: Jackie Robinson
Aug 15 1947: Indian independance
Oct 14 1947: Sound barrier broken
Jan 5 1948: Pollock's debut exhibit
May 14 1948: Foundation of Israel
Oct 1 1949: Birth of Communist China
Feb 9 1950: Joseph McCarthy
Oct 15 1951: I Love Lucy premieres
Oct 20 1952: Mau Mau revolt
Feb 28 1953: Watson and Crick and the double helix
Jul 5 1954: Elvis's first recording session
Dec 12 1955: Rosa Parks
Oct 4 1957: Sputnik
Jul 17 1959: The Leakeys at Olduvai Gorge
May 9 1960: Birth control pill
Sep 27 1962: Silent Spring
Oct 11 1962: Second Vatican Council
Oct 27 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis
Aug 28 1963: MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech
Nov 22 1963: JFK assassinated
Feb 9 1964: The Beatles on Ed Sullivan
Jun 30 1966: National Organization of Women founded
Aug 5 1966: Mao's Cultural Revolution
Dec 3 1967: First heart transplant
Jan 31 1968: Tet Offensive
Apr 4 1968: MLK assassinated
Jun 5 1968: RFK assassinated
Jun 28 1969: The Stonewall riot
Jul 20 1969: Apollo moon landing
Mar 15 1971: First microprocessor
Jun 17 1972: Watergate break-in
Jan 22 1973: Roe v. Wade
Apr 30 1975: Fall of Saigon
Apr 1 1976: Apple Computers founded
May 25 1977: Star Wars
Jul 25 1978: First "test tube baby"
Feb 1 1979: Khomeini takes power in Iran
May 3 1979: Margaret Thatcher becomes PM
Dec 12 1979: USSR invades Afghanistan
Sep 20 1980: Birth of 401(k)
Jul 27 1982: AIDS named
Mar 8 1983: Reagan calls USSR "the evil empire"
Mar 11 1985: Gorbachev becomes General Secretary
Dec 29 1987: FDA approves Prozac
Nov 9 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall
Nov 24 1989: Bin-Laden rises to power
Feb 11 1990: Mandella freed
Aug 6 1991: Birth of the world wide web
Feb 26 1993: World Trade Center bombing
Oct 3 1995: OJ Simpson verdict
Aug 31 1997: Death of Princess Di
Mar 27 1998: FDA approves Viagra
Nov 29 1999: WTO protests in Seattle
Dec 12 2000: Supreme Court declares Bush winner
Sep 11 2001: Duh yet again
Jan 29 2002: Bush's State of the Union Address

While some of them seem odd (the Princess Di one is utter bullshit), there are some interesting choices in there.

And I'm putting this in Politics because of the historical content and the fact that many of these events are still shaping events today.

It's actually the date that was Sheik Abdullah Azzam killed, which allowed Bin Laden to assume his leadership role in the call to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, which led to our support of him, which led to ... well, you know. The summaries are my own, not Time's, and nothing else seemed to sum up the event in a way that would make most people understand why it was selected.

That's also why I provided the link, so you could read the stories and see why they were chosen. The written pieces accompanying each date are actually fairly well-done and usually written by someone directly involved with the event -- Gorbachev writes on his first day as General Secretary, for example. It's a good read.

The reader's choices are pretty interesting too -- they mention the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Hindenburg, Midway, Stalingrad, the Rosenbergs, Brown v. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Six-Day War, the Camp David Accords, Challenger, Rodney King, the Oklahoma City bombing, Dolly the sheep, Columbine, the Human Genome Project, and a bunch of other events the editors passed over.