TIME Person Of The Year

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Simpson was the first woman named Person of the Year (she would be followed by, among others, Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 and Philippine President Corazon Aquino in 1986). A twice-divorced American socialite, she was, to Britain's King Edward VIII, "the woman I love," for whom he abdicated the throne in a saga that shook the monarchy. Their love was deep, but their long, resplendent exile as Duke and Duchess of Windsor struck some as arid and irrelevant. Still, when the King announced his decision, she was, as TIME wrote, "the most talked-about, written-about, headlined and interest-compelling person in the world."

1962 POPE JOHN XXIII

The 1960s were a decade of upheaval and renewal, and if Angelo Roncalli--the Italian farmer's son who had become Pope at the age of 76--had anything to say about it, the 900-million-member Roman Catholic Church would be no exception. Pope John convened the ecumenical council called Vatican II. Its purpose: to bring the church into line with modern science, economics, morals and politics and to end the division that had dissipated the Christian message for centuries. In doing so, TIME wrote, he "set in motion ideas and forces that will affect not merely Roman Catholics, not only Christians, but the whole world's ever expanding population."

1963 MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Preacher, activist, follower of Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance, King had emerged as the champion of American blacks' crusade for civil rights. A veteran of the Montgomery, Ala., bus protests of the 1950s and the Southern sit-ins of the '60s, King came to the fore in the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., demonstrations for desegregation. In the same year he led 200,000 in the March on Washington and gave the galvanizing "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "He articulates the longings, the hopes, the aspirations of his people," said his colleague the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. King went on in 1964 to win the Nobel Peace Prize and to see the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. But the price he had always paid for his nonviolent leadership was violence. He was repeatedly assaulted, his home bombed. In 1968 he paid the ultimate price: he was assassinated on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., by James Earl Ray.

1975 AMERICAN WOMEN

Starting with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, contemporary feminism--women's lib--had been a newly surging social current in America. Riding its crest were such vivid provocateurs as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. But by 1975, TIME argued, feminism had "transcended the feminist movement" and penetrated every layer of society. The idea of equal social and professional rights for women, "once the doctrine of well-educated middle-class women," had "taken hold among working-class women, farm wives, blacks, Puerto Ricans, white 'ethnics.'" The drama of the sexes remained, TIME cautioned--"the Old Adam and the New Eve." But "enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent."

1979 AYATULLAH KHOMEINI