1960
February 1: The first sit-in by African Americans is staged at a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina.

November: John F. Kennedy is elected president. Envoid, the first birth-control pill is approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

1961
May: Busloads of black and white civil rights workers, called Freedom Riders, travel through the South demanding an end to segregation on interstate bus travel; the U.S. supplies the South Vietnamese army with thirty-six helicopters and four hundred American advisers, providing direct military support for the first time.

1962
September: Black air force veteran James Meredith becomes the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. He begins classes under the protection of U.S. Marshals.

October: When the United States discovers that the Soviet Union is building nuclear missile launch sites in Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupts, threatening all-out nuclear war between the...