1970s  File:1970s decade montage.png| Clockwise from top left: U.S. President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office following the Watergate scandal in 1974; refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; the 1973 oil crisis puts the nation of America in gridlock and causes economic damage throughout the developed world; both the leaders of Israel and Egypt shake hands after the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978; the 1970 Bhola cyclone kills an estimated 500,000 people in the densely populated Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan (which would become independent as Bangladesh in 1971) in November 1970; the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ousts Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi who is later replaced by an Islamic theocracy led by Ayatollah Khomeini; the popularity of the disco music genre peaks during the mid-to-late 1970s.|420px|thumb rect 301 4 592 200 Fall of Saigon rect 2 2 297 200 Watergate scandal rect 390 202 611 424 1973 oil crisis rect 192 203 386 423 Disco rect 0 203 184 424 Iranian Revolution rect 309 426 600 621 Camp David Accords rect 0 427 305 621 1970 Bhola cyclone   The 1970s (pronounced "nineteen-seventies"; shortened to "the 70s") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1970, and ended on December 31, 1979. In the 21st century, historians have increasingly portrayed the 1970s as a "pivot of change" in world history, focusing especially on the economic upheavals that followed the end of the postwar economic boom. In the Western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. In the United Kingdom, the 1979 election resulted in the victory of its Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister. Industrialized countries, except Japan, experienced an economic recession due to an oil crisis caused by oil embargoes by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. The crisis saw the first instance of stagflation which began a political and economic trend of the replacement of Keynesian economic theory with neoliberal economic theory, with the first neoliberal governments being created in Chile, where a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet took place in 1973. Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term "'Me' decade" in his essay "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening", published by "New York Magazine" in August 1976 referring to the 1970s.