Social & Scientific Developments

Lutheran Events

Albert Schweitzer is ordained.

Zeppelin passes its first test flight.

U.S. Supreme Court states Congress can ignore Indian treaties when in the interest of the nation.

Caruso makes the first vocal music recording.

F. Melius Christiansen begins directing the St. Olaf Lutheran Choir.

Major earthquake does extensive damage in San Francisco.

Howard Gold is called as the nation's first Lutheran campus pastor in Madison, Wisconsin.

Federal Council of Churches is established.

Stravinsky composes The Firebird.

Rosa Young opens a private school for African-Americans in Rosebud, Alabama.

Gandhi returns to India.

World-wide influenza epidemic strikes, kills 22 million people.

U.S. population is 103.5 million.

The Norwegian Synod of the American Evangelical Lutheran Church is established.

The Lutheran Free Church begins publishing Lutheran Messenger.

Maud Powlas becomes a missionary teacher in Japan, is followed a year later by her sister Annie.

First experiments conducted with short-wave radio.

The Rev. F. A. Neumeister, missionary in Sinton and Woddsboro, Texas, starts conducting worship services at the Mellenbruck farm for Mexicans in San Juan, using interpreters.

Mary Markley (1881-1945) becomes first woman secretary with the ULCA Board of Education, assigned to administer religious work with college students. First position of its type in an American church.

League of Nations is established in Geneva.

Earthquake in China kills 200,000.

19th Amendment to the Constitution gives women the vote in U.S.

Sound films developed.

Insulin first given to diabetic patients.

Reader's Digest is founded.

Lutheran university students vote into existence the Lutheran Student Association of America, now known as the Lutheran Student Movement-USA.

Sister Emma Francis is consecrated in New York.

Ku Klux Klan conclave in Indianapolis draws 200,000.

Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch fails.

What made Jesus Cantu's baptism special?

Germany is admitted to the League of Nations.

On the radio, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was heard direct from the Cotton Club.

Grandma Moses begins painting full-time.

First scheduled TV broadcasts are produced in New York.

Planet Pluto is discovered.

Name of Constantinople changed to Istanbul.

Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor in Germany and granted dictatorial powers.

Will Rogers, Cherokee, dies in plane crash.

Delawares (in Oklahoma) finally recognized as an Indian tribe by U.S. government.

True Light Lutheran Church, New York City, is founded as the first Asian Lutheran congregation in America by The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Nylon stockings appear.

Hemingway writes For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Seminoles refuse to register for the draft; they are technically still at war with the U.S.

Walt Disney Studios produce the film Fantasia.

Citizen Kane hits the box office.

McMillan and Seaborg discover plutonium.

The National Lutheran Council establishes a Service Commission to provide chaplaincy services to the armed forces.

E. Theodore Bachmann marries Mercia Brenne.

First sustained nuclear reaction at Manhattan Project after Fermi splits the atom.

First jet airplanes become operational.

First atomic bomb detonated in New Mexico.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is martyred after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

World War II ends.

NLC forms Division of American Missions.

Arthur Carl Piepkorn serves as senior chaplain of the U.S. occupational forces in Germany.

Benjamin Spock publishes Baby and Child Care.

Churchill gives his "Iron curtain" speech.

Church World Service begins its work, later becomes a part of the National Council of Churches.

India becomes independent and is partitioned into India and Pakistan.

Dead Sea scrolls are discovered at Wadi Qumran.

Sound barrier broken in first supersonic flight.

Jackie Robinson becomes a Brooklyn Dodger, breaking the color barrier in professional baseball.

Transistor is invented in Bell Laboratory.

After World War II, the ALC Luther League and Women's Missionary Society were involved in Mexican mission. A church was built in Elsa, Texas; a newspaper, El Mansajero Luterano, was published; and a Bible school organized for training lay workers.

Lutheran Vespers radio ministry begins broadcasting. Go to the Media Center in the village to learn more about Lutheran Vespers' ministry.

The Associates in Diaconal Service is started as a volunteer ministry sponsored by the Deaconess Community of the ULCA. The program is to become the Diaconal Year Program in the ELCA.

Mildred Winston publishes her second book, Women, A Resource in the Church.

Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated in India.

Cordelia Cox becomes first woman to head a major U.S. Lutheran agency as director of Lutheran Immigration.

First credit card.

Mao Tse-tung declares People's Republic of China.

Senator McCarthy begins Anti-Communist hearings.

Korean War begins.

The Rev. Rene Gonzalez was installed at the first Lutheran church built in Mexico, in Tapachula.

Who were the first Asian Americans ordained by ELCA predecessor churches?

Color television is introduced in U.S.

The Orthodox Lutheran Conference is formed.

First contraceptive pill is introduced.

Eisenhower becomes president in U.S.

Sir Edmund Hillary and party climb Mt. Everest.

Dag Hammarskjold becomes U.N. Secretary General.

Stalin is succeeded by Malenkov and Kruschev.

Brown vs. Board of Education ends legal segregation in schools.

Disneyland opens in California.

Dien Bien Phu is taken by the Vietminh.

Elvis Presley has his first hit record.

On December 1, Ms. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and is arrested for violating a Montgomery, Ala., law against desegregation.

Nasser seizes control of Suez Canal.

First nuclear power plant built in U.S.

First transatlantic phone cable is laid.

Eric Modean is saluted as "Dean of the Lutheran Press Corps" by his journalist colleagues.

Mau-Mau revolt occurs in Kenya.

Federal troops enforce integration of Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools.

What other major North American Lutheran church is founded the same year?

The Lutheran World Federation meets in the U.S. for the first time in Minneapolis.

Chrismon ministry started by Frances Spencer at Ascension Lutheran Church, Danville, Virginia.

U.S. launches satellite Explorer I.

John XXIII becomes Pope.

C.P. Harry, "Father of the U.S. Lutheran Student Movement," dies.

Frank Lloyd Wright builds Guggenheim Museum.

Four-year Cuban Revolution comes to an end.

16 African nations become independent.

U2 flight intercepted, Powers jailed in U.S.S.R.

Ruth Youngdahl Nelson is named Church Woman of the Year (becomes Mother of the Year in 1973).

The Canada District of the American Lutheran Church is formed. In 1966 it becomes the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada, a separate autonomous church.

Lutheran churches first start providing pension and health benefit plans.

Church of the Lutheran Confession is formed.

Second Indochinese War begins, lasts until 1975.

Kennedy becomes president, establishes the Peace Corps.

Yuri Gagarin becomes first human in space.

Joseph Sittler publishes The Ecology of Faith.

John Glenn becomes first astronaut to orbit earth.

U.S. blockade of Cuba begins, U.S.S.R. withdraws Cuban missiles aimed at U.S.

Andy Warhol paints Marilyn Monroe.

Lutheran-Reformed Dialogue begins.

Association of Free Lutheran Congregations is formed.

President Kennedy is assassinated

Freedom Marchers, 200,000 in number, demonstrate in Washington.

The LCA establishes a long-range program of Parish Education, producing markedly different curricula.

Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota is the first Lutheran agency to have a budget of $1 million.

Eiichi Matsushita begins 21 years of service with LCA's Board of American Missions.

"Beatlemania" sweeps the U.S.

Civil Rights Act is passed.

First woman in space

Zanzibar and Tanganyika unite to form Tanzania.

Statement on Race Relationships is passed in LCA.

Rebellion brews in LCMS.

Malcolm X is killed in New York.

COCU -- Consultation on Church Union begins.

Wilson Wu is ordained by LCA and begins work in Monterey Park, Calif. His congregation organizes in 1968 as Faith Lutheran Church, first Asian Lutheran congregation in what is now ELCA.

U.S. build-up in Vietnam is protested around the world in "International Days of Protest."

Buckminster Fuller introduces his geodesic sphere.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada is established.

Task Force on Justice and Social Change is formed in LCA.

Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship formed to plan new worship book.

The deaconess motherhouses in Philadelphia, Omaha and Baltimore merge to form the Deaconess Community of the LCA.

Six Day War between Israel and Arab nations when Israel occupies the West Bank, Sinai and Jerusalem.

First successful heart transplant

Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue begins.

Vietcong Tet offensive forces President Johnson not to run for reelection.

Woodstock music fair attracts 300,000 people to farm in upstate New York.

Large demonstrations in many cities oppose the war in Vietnam.

Navajo Community College opens as first Indian-controlled college.

At the invitation of Augustana College, Sioux Falls, S.D., E.W. Mueller sets up the Center for Community Organization and Area Development, an experimental research center for rural ministry.

Flood kills 500,000 people in East Pakistan.

ALC adopts provisional use of the title bishop.

ALC and LCA conventions also received and approved the report of the six-year-old inter-Lutheran confirmation commission that recommended separating confirmation from first Communion, allowing children to commune at earlier ages and allowing confirmation instruction to take place at later ages.

Who was Eugene Crawford?

Idi Amin becomes ruler in Uganda.

Pocket calculator comes on the market.

Marc Chagall paints Circus with Jugglers.

President Nixon visits China.

Terrorists murder 11 Israeli Olympians in Munich.

CAT scan is used for medical diagnoses.

LCA does a "Study of Generations."

Arab oil-producing states embargo shipments to U.S., Europe and Japan, leading to an energy crisis in the West.

Roe vs. Wade -- abortion becomes legal

Wounded Knee is occupied by American Indians.

Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELiM) formed by "moderates" within the Missouri Synod as a "confessing movement" in response to actions taken at the LCMS convention. ELiM begins publishing Missouri in Perspective.

How many church bodies adopted the "Key 73" evangelism program?

Watergate scandal leads to Nixon resignation.

Picasso dies.

American Lutheran pastor, Carl H. Mau, Jr. (1922-1995), becomes the fifth General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, serving until 1985.

Motivated in part by the youth departments of the two church bodies, The American Lutheran Church and Lutheran Church in America both begin World Hunger appeals in response to a famine situation in West Africa.

Altair personal computer is introduced by MIT.

FBI agents and Indians on Pine Ridge reservation confront each other; one Indian and two agents are killed.

Henriette Lund receives the United Nations peace medallion.

Stanley R. Goodwin and George Tinker are the first American Indian Lutherans to be ordained as Lutherans.

Earthquakes in Italy, Bali, Turkey, China and the Philippines result in 780,000 deaths.

Elvis dies, as does Mao Tse-Tung.

Egypt's President Sadat becomes first Arab leader to visit Israel.

Israel and Egypt sign Camp David Accords.

Cult members commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

AELC issues "Call to Union."

Ayatollah Khomeini overthrows Shah of Iran, sets up an Iranian "republic." U.S. embassy staff are taken hostage by Iranians, among them Katherine Koob.

The Association of Black Lutherans is formed.

World Health Organizations announces eradication of smallpox.

Solidarity trade union formed after shipyard strike at Gdansk, Poland.

Ronald Reagan becomes president, and Iran frees U.S. hostages.

AIDS is diagnosed for the first time.

Falklands War between Britain and Argentina.

"Rap" music makes first public appearances.

What major ecumenical documents began to be studied in churches?

The Rev. Cherian C. Puthiyottil develops a number of refugee resettlement ministries at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, working in cooperation with the Southeast Asian community.

Drought in Ethiopia brings famine to millions.

Ruth Sovik becomes general secretary of the World YWCA.

RAM memory chip

Indira Gandhi is assassinated by bodyguards.

"Live Aid" rock concert is held in London for Ethiopian famine relief.

Gorbachev unilaterally halts deployment of missiles in Europe.

Vietnamese Lutheran Church, Seattle, Wash., was the second Vietnamese Lutheran congregation to be organized in the U.S.

Ouster of Marcos in Philippines, Corazon Aquino becomes president.

William Rehnquist becomes U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Bangladesh's worst floods make millions homeless.

U.S. and U.S.S.R. sign treaty to ban short- and medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe.

Armenian earthquake kills 80,000, leaves 500,000 homeless.

Nationalist demonstrations and strikes in Albania, Poland, the Baltics and Caucasus.

The American Association of Lutheran Services for the Aging and the Lutheran Association of Housing Ministries merge to form the National Association of Lutheran Ministries with the Aging.