There's a cool poll over at CNN asking what you think the most significant events during the last 8 decades are.

My choices:

1923 - Kemal Ataturk becomes president of Turkey
1924 - Hitler writes the first volume of Mein Kampf
1925 - John Scopes is tried and convicted for teaching evolution
1926 - Henry Ford institutes the five-day, 40-hour work week
1927 - TV makes its first U.S. long-distance broadcast
1928 - Penicillin discovered
1929 - Stock market collapses; the Great Depression begins

1930 - Gandhi starts non-violent civil disobedience campaign against British salt tax
1931 - Harold Urey discovers heavy hydrogen
1932 - Franklin D. Roosevelt elected president in landslide
1933 - Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany (tough choice considering the beginning of the New Deal was an option)
1934 - Congress approves establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission
1935 - Hitler strips Jews of German citizenship
1936 - Jesse Owens disproves Hitler's claim of Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals at Berlin Olympics
1937 - Britain's King Edward VIII abdicates throne to marry Wallis Simpson
1938 - First major commercial discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia (at the time of this posting, this choice and "Kristallnacht, the night Nazis ravage Jewish communities throughout Germany" were neck and neck in the results, with oil barely leading)
1939 - Britain and France declare war on Germany; World War II begins

1940 - Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain
1941 - Japan attacks Pearl Harbor
1942 - U.S. forces destroy Japan's first-line carriers in the Battle of Midway
1943 - German Army surrenders in Stalingrad
1944 - D-Day: Allies invade Normandy
1945 - U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima
1946 - ENIAC, the first electronic computer, debuts
1947 - India gains independence from Britain; Pakistan is created
1948 - Israel declares independence
1949 - The U.S. and its European allies form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism

1950 - North Korean Communist forces invade South Korea
1951 - Rachel Carson raises environmental awareness with The Sea Around Us
1952 - First mechanical heart valve used in a human
1953 - Francis Crick & James Watson discover the structure of DNA
1954 - Racial segregation declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the civil rights movement
1956 - The Federal Aid Highway Act passes, creating the interstate highway system
1957 - Russia launches first space satellite Sputnik (no option to pick Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged???)
1958 - The BankAmericard is introduced, which later becomes the Visa card and fosters the boom in revolving credit
1959 - Castro takes over in Cuba

1960 - The Food and Drug Administration approves the Pill for contraception
1961 - Russia's Yuri Gagarin is the first person to orbit the earth
1962 - Cuban Missile crisis erupts when U.S. discovers Soviet Union placed nuclear arms in Cuba
1963 - Supreme Court rules against requiring prayer in public schools (soo many good choices for this year, but the JFK assassination is dominating the results)
1964 - On their first U.S. tour, the Beatles appear to a delirious reception on the Ed Sullivan show (another tough year)
1965 - The Immigration Act ends national quotas, emphasizes employment and family ties instead
1966 - Mao launches China's "Cultural Revolution"
1967 - Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs the world's first successful human heart transplant
1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated in Memphis
1969 - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are first to set foot on moon

1970 - Voting age in U.S. is reduced to 18
1971 - Intel introduces the first microprocessor chip
1972 - Eleven Israeli athletes killed at Munich Olympic Games
1973 - Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion
1974 - CAT scan is developed
1975 - U.S. evacuates from Vietnam; Saigon falls to Communists
1976 - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple Computer
1977 - Star Wars opens
1978 - Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin sign Camp David Accords
1979 - Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq

1980 - Ronald Reagan elected President
1981 - MTV premiers with the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star
1982 - The name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is given to a mysterious fatal disease
1983 - Truck bomb kills 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, Lebanon
1984 - Run-D.M.C releases its eponymous album and rap enters the mainstream
1985 - Reagan Administration begins selling arms to Iran, diverts money to Nicaraguan contras
1986 - Nuclear reactor explodes at Chernobyl power plant
1987 - Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 508 points
1988 - Osama bin Laden founds al-Qaeda in Afghanistan
1989 - The Berlin Wall is torn down (either this or the Tiananmen Square massacre)

1990 - First World Wide Web page debuts
1991 - The Soviet Union officially collapses
1992 - White voters approve referendum to end apartheid in South Africa
1993 - Congress ratifies North American Free Trade Agreement
1994 - Kenneth Starr becomes Whitewater independent counsel
1995 - Truck bomb destroys Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
1996 - Taliban Muslim fundamentalists capture Kabul
1997 - Scientists announce existence of Dolly the sheep, the result of first cloned adult mammal
1998 - Clinton is impeached
1999 - World Trade Organization conference disrupted by violent protests in Seattle

2000 - Supreme Court ruling ensures the election of George W. Bush
2001 - Al-Qaeda terrorists hijack four planes and attack New York City and Washington D.C.
2002 - George Bush identifies an axis of evil that will be focus of America's vigilant attention: Iraq, Iran and North Korea