1966
year
1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1966th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 966th year of the 2nd millennium, the 66th year of the 20th century, and the 7th year of the 1960s decade.
Events
January
January 1 – In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa takes over as military ruler of the Central African Republic, ousting President David Dacko.
January 3 – 1966 Upper Voltan coup d'état: President Maurice Yaméogo is deposed by a military coup in the Republic of Upper Volta (modern-day Burkina Faso).
January 10
Pakistani–Indian peace negotiations end successfully with the signing of the Tashkent Declaration, a day before the sudden death of Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
The House of Representatives of the US state of Georgia refuses to allow African-American representative Julian Bond to take his seat, because of his anti-war stance.
January 15 – 1966 Nigerian coup d'état: A bloody military coup is staged in Nigeria, deposing the civilian government and resulting in the death of Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.
January 17
The Nigerian coup is overturned by another faction of the military, led by Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, leaving a military government in power and beginning a long period of military rule.
1966 Palomares B-52 crash: A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain, dropping three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares, and one into the sea. Carl Brashear, the first African-American United States Navy diver, is involved in an accident during the recovery of the latter, which results in the amputation of his leg.
January 19 – Indira Gandhi is elected Prime Minister of India; she is sworn in on January 24.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1966” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2649. The Library of Congress control number is sh2003004091. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “1966” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.