Sunday · November 15, 2026
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19791776 Club

Carter orders a halt to all Iranian oil imports, eight days into the embassy standoff

With 66 Americans held inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the White House reaches for an economic lever.

Eight days after Iranian students loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini broke through the gates of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, 66 Americans were still being held inside. On November 12, 1979, President Jimmy Carter ordered a halt to all petroleum imports into the United States from Iran. The order was one of several economic measures Washington used against Tehran, and it came from a President pressed to answer the seizure. The hostages stayed where they were…

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More from November 12
1969

Seymour Hersh's story of the My Lai killings goes out to American newspapers

Twenty months after Charlie Company entered the village, an independent reporter puts the massacre of civilians in front of American readers.
1997

Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing

After a Manhattan trial that opened August 3 and called more than 100 witnesses, the planner of the 1993 van bomb is convicted.
2022

Two warbirds collide above 4,000 spectators at the Wings Over Dallas airshow

A P-63 Kingcobra banking toward the runway strikes the lead B-17 from above; all six aboard both aircraft are killed.
19711776 Club
The order extends Vietnamization, the plan to shift the ground war onto South Vietnam's own army.
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More from Cold War America
1963

Three powers agree: no more bombs in the sky, underwater, or in space

Underground testing remains legal; a hotline between Washington and Moscow had opened six weeks earlier.
1960

Havana seizes American holdings; Washington cancels the sugar quota within a day

By year's end every U.S. company on the island answers to Castro's government instead of its own board.
1965

Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act; literacy tests are now outlawed nationwide

Five months after troopers attacked marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the federal government takes oversight of Southern voter rolls.
1959

A tumbling satellite over Mexico snaps the first picture of Earth from orbit

One week after launch, a 64-element scanner aboard Explorer 6 built the image one spot at a time.
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