1978

1950–1980	UK [television]	Watch With Mother, a series for young children featuring favourite characters such as Andy Pandy, the Flowerpot Men, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, and the Woodentops, is shown on British television.
1970–1979	USA [statistics and demography]	The number of one-parent families in the USA increases 79%, representing one in five of all families.
1970–1979	USA [statistics and demography]	There are over 4 million immigrants to the USA in the period 1970–79, coming mainly from Asia and the Americas.
1971–1978	USA, North America, Asia, Europe, South America, Africa [statistics and demography]	Immigration patterns in the USA: 38% from North America (Mexico, Caribbean); 35% from Asia; 19% from Europe; 6% from South America; and 2% from Africa.
15 January 1974 - 12 July 1984	USA [television]	The situation comedy Happy Days, about family life in the 1950s, premiers on US television and runs for 11 seasons.
11 September 1974 - 21 March 1983	USA [television]	Little House on the Prairie, a popular television drama based on the classic series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, starts on US television. It chronicles the Ingalls family's struggles in the American West in the 1870s.
1975–1979	UK [television]	Fawlty Towers, a comedy series starring John Cleese as the rude and disaster-prone Torquay hotelier Basil Fawlty, is shown on British television. It also stars Connie Booth, Prunella Scales, and Andrew Sachs.
1976–1981	UK, USA [television]	The Muppet Show, featuring sketches and songs by Jim Henson's puppets – including Kermit and Miss Piggy – is shown on British and US television.
6 December 1977 - 24 March 1978	USA [work and unemployment]	One of the longest strikes in the history of the US coal industry ends when miners receive higher wages and more generous benefits.
1978	USA [trade]	Sneakers account for 50% of shoe sales in the USA.
1978	USA [women's rights]	The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is passed in the USA, protecting women from being denied employment because of pregnancy.
1978	UK [statistics and demography]	The British take 48 million holidays: some 9 million of these are holidays abroad, with 30% of holidaymakers going to Spain.
1978	USA [statistics and demography]	In the USA, 49% of all women work, up from 31% in 1950; 48% of married women work, double the percentage in 1950.
1978	USA [statistics and demography]	The birth rate in the USA is 15.3 per 1,000 population, a decline from 24.1 in 1950.
1978	USA [statistics and demography]	Life expectancy in the USA is 70.2 years for men and 77.8 years for women, up from 64.4 and 69.5 in 1945.
1978	USA [cinema and film]	The comedy National Lampoon's Animal House, directed by John Landis, is released in the USA. It stars John Belushi and Tim Matheson and becomes a cult classic.
1978	USA [computing]	The US company DEC introduces the VAX (virtual address extension) computer; able to run very large programmes, it becomes an industry standard for scientific and technical applications.
1978	USA [computing]	US computer programmer John Barnaby develops the word processing program ‘Wordstar’; it becomes the most popular word processor in the early 1980s.
1978	Germany [ballet]	The ballet Orpheus and Eurydice by the German choreographer Pina Bausch, to music by the 18th-century composer Christoph Gluck, is first performed, in Germany.
1978	UK [fiction]	The Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch publishes her novel The Sea, The Sea, which wins the Booker Prize.
1978	UK [everyday life]	The queen's sister Princess Margaret obtains a divorce from her husband, the Earl of Snowdon, in the UK.
1978	England [musicals]	The musical Evita, with text by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, receives its first performance, at the Prince Edward Theatre, in London, England. The song ‘Don't Cry for Me Argentina’ becomes well known.
1978	USA [plays]	The play Buried Child, by the US writer Sam Shepard, is first performed, at the Theater de Lys in New York City.
1978	UK [plays]	The play Plenty, by the English writer David Hare, is first performed, at the National Theatre in London, England.
1978	USA [popular music]	Disco music predominates, as the soundtrack to the film Saturday Night Fever tops the album charts.
1978	England, USA [popular music]	The English punk rocker Sid Vicious (born John Simon Ritchie) is arrested in New York City in connection with the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. He is to die of a heroin overdose before going to trial.
1978	UK, USA [popular music]	As punk declines, new wave music emerges into the mainstream, influenced particularly by US bands such as Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones. An early influence on punk, new wave's roots are in New York City, especially venues such as the club CBGB's.
1978	UK [popular music]	The music magazine Smash Hits is launched; it will become the most successful magazine for the teenage market in the UK.
1978	UK [consumer products]	The first product bar code in the UK is used, on a packet of Melrose's 100 Century Tea.
3 March 1978	Rhodesia [law and government]	The Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, and three black leaders sign an agreement for a power-sharing government and eventual majority rule, but exclude Robert Mugabe's and Joshua Nkomo's Patriotic Front.
5 March 1978	China [law and government]	A new Chinese constitution affirms the rule of law, in contrast to the policies under the Cultural Revolution.
22 March 1978	Lebanon [political events]	The first United Nations ‘UNIFIL’ (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) troops arrive in Lebanon.
3 April 1978	UK [radio]	Regular radio broadcasts of the proceedings of the British Parliament begin.
1 May 1978	UK [fairs and festivals]	The UK celebrates May Day as a public holiday for the first time.
8 May 1978	Asia [mountaineering]	Reinhold Messner of Italy and Peter Habeler of Austria become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, without bottled oxygen.
18 May 1978	Italy [health and medicine]	Despite intense Vatican opposition, Italy votes to make abortion legal in the first 90 days of pregnancy.
25 May 1978	UK [law and government]	The British Liberal Party leader David Steel announces the end of the ‘Lib–Lab Pact’ with Labour.
June 1978	UK [television]	Manufactured by JVC in Japan and sold under licence by Ferguson, the first video cassette recorders in the UK go on sale.
26 June 1978	South Yemen [political events]	The president of South Yemen, Salem Ruba Ali, is assassinated by the faction that murdered the North Yemeni president, Ahmed al-Ghashmi.
4 July 1978	USA [technology]	Scientists at the Princeton Large Torus test reactor achieve a temperature of 54 million K/60 million°F, and maintain it for one-twentieth of a second. It is hailed as a breakthrough for nuclear fusion.
7 July 1978	Solomon Islands, UK [decolonization]	The Solomon Islands gain their independence from Britain.
25 July 1978	England [surgery]	Louise Brown is born at Oldham Hospital, London, England; she is the first ‘test tube’ baby. Having been unable to remove a blockage from her mother's Fallopian tube, gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and physiologist Robert Edwards removed an egg from her ovary, fertilized it with her husband's sperm, and re-implanted it in her uterus.
29 July 1978	USA, UK, France [swimming and diving]	Penny Dean, a 23-year-old Californian, swims the English Channel in a new world record time of 7 hours 42 minutes.
26 August 1978	Vatican, Italy [Catholicism]	Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, is elected pope. He takes the name John Paul I.
5 September - 17 September 1978	USA, Egypt, Israel [political events]	A summit at Camp David, Maryland, USA, between the US president, Jimmy Carter, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, concludes with a ‘framework’ peace treaty ending 30 years of hostility between Israel and Egypt.
15 September 1978	Spain [law and government]	The Spanish parliament recognizes the demand of the Basques for autonomy.
19 September 1978	UK, Rhodesia [companies and organizations]	The Bingham Report in Britain reveals that the oil companies British Petroleum and Shell have broken sanctions against Rhodesia and that British ministers concealed knowledge of this.
23 September 1978	USA [popular music]	The US new wave group Blondie releases the album Parallel Lines.
30 September 1978	Tuvalu, UK [decolonization]	Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands, in the southwest Pacific, gains its independence from Britain.
4 October 1978	Lebanon [political events]	An estimated 500 people are killed or wounded in heavy battles in the civil war in Beirut, Lebanon.
16 October 1978	Vatican [Catholicism]	Following the deaths of Pope Paul VI on 6 August and his successor John Paul I on 28 September, Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Kraków, is elected as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope since 1522.
24 October 1978	USA [aircraft]	The US Airline Deregulation Act provides for the phasing out of government control of the airline industry; routes are to be deregulated by 1982 and prices by 1 January 1985. The airlines respond by abandoning the less profitable shorter routes and competing on the longer, more profitable ones by cutting fares.
29 October 1978	China [law and government]	The late Mao Zedong's collection of thoughts, known as the Little Red Book, is denounced in China.
3 November 1978	Dominica, UK [decolonization]	Dominica gains its independence from Britain.
18 November 1978	USA, Guyana [religion]	The US cult leader Jim Jones leads 913 followers, most of them Americans, and including 276 children, in a mass suicide at the so-called People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. The slaughter is precipitated by the murder of US representative Leo J Ryan and four associates, who had visited Jonestown to investigate charges of religious coercion.
29 November 1978	UK [football]	Viv Anderson of Nottingham Forest becomes the first black footballer to play for England.
30 November 1978	UK [newspapers]	The Times and The Sunday Times stop publication in the UK, when unions strike over the introduction of new computer typesetting equipment and resulting lost jobs. The strike will continue for 11 months.
15 December 1978	USA, China [diplomacy]	The USA and China normalize diplomatic relations with effect from 1 January 1979.
25 December 1978	Vietnam, Cambodia [political events]	Vietnam begins a full-scale invasion of Cambodia.