May 15 – Donna Payant is murdered by serial killer Lemuel Smith, the first time a female correctional officer has been killed on-duty in the United States.
Juneedit
June – The United States enters the severe early 1980s recession, exactly a year after the more minor 1980 recession ended; the unemployment rate is 7.2%
June 29 – Morris Edwin Robert, armed with a machine gun, holds hostages in the FBI section at the Atlanta, Georgia Federal Building. After three hours, the hostages are rescued and Robert is killed in a shootout with federal agents.
July 10 – Walt Disney Productions' 24th feature film, The Fox and the Hound, is released after a six-month delay due to the departure of Don Bluth and his animation team from the studio. The film receives mixed-to-positive reviews and is a box office success.
Israeli aircraft bomb Beirut, destroying multi-story apartment blocks containing the offices of PLO associated groups, killing approximately 300 civilians and resulting in worldwide condemnation and a U.S. embargo on the export of aircraft to Israel.[1]
July 27 – Adam Walsh, 6, is kidnapped from a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida.
Augustedit
August 1 – MTV (Music Television) is launched on cable television in the United States.
August 10 – Exactly two weeks after his disappearance, the severed head of 6-year-old Hollywood, Florida native Adam Walsh is found in a canal in Vero Beach, Florida; to this day the rest of the boy's body has never been recovered.
August 12 – The original Model 5150 IBM PC (with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor) is released in the United States at a base price of $1,565.
August 24 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, after being convicted of murdering John Lennon in Manhattan eight months earlier.
September 15 – The John Bull becomes the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world, at 150 years old, when it operates under its own power outside Washington, DC.
September 17 – Ric Flair defeats Dusty Rhodes to win his first World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship in Kansas City.
November 30 – Cold War: In Geneva, representatives from the United States and the Soviet Union begin negotiating intermediate-range nuclear weapon reductions in Europe (the meetings end inconclusively on Thursday, December 17).
^Cullinan, Bernice E.; Person, Diane Goetz (2005). The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. New York: Continuum. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-82641-778-7.
External linksedit
Media related to 1981 in the United States at Wikimedia Commons