* 1911 – Feodor Felix Konrad Lynen, German biochemist, Nobel laureate ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Sam Atwell, Australian actor

* 1979 – Christine Smith, American model and actress

* 1979 – Lord Frederick Windsor, British financial analyst

* 1907 – Hardie Gramatky, American author and animator ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Claire Danes, American actress

* 1979 – Jordan De Jong, American baseball player

* 1979 – Elena Grosheva, Russian gymnast

* 1979 – Mateja Kežman, Serbian footballer

* 1979 – Jennifer Morrison, American actress and model

* 1979 – Paul Nicholls, English actor

* 1979 – Cristian Ranalli, Italian footballer

* 1979 – Gerardo Torrado, Mexican footballer

* 1979 – A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British World War II admiral Louis Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday in Sligo, Republic of Ireland.

* 1886 – Rebecca Clarke, English composer and violist ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Giovanni Capitello, American actor and producer

* 1979 – Tian Liang, Chinese diver

* 1979 – Sarah Neufeld, Canadian violinist ( Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre )

* 1979 – Aaron Paul, American actor

* 1979 – Rusty Smith, American speed skater

* 1979 – Francesco Bellotti, Italian cyclist

* 1979 – Megumi Okina, Japanese actress and singer

* 1929 – Abdi İpekçi, Turkish journalist ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Michael Kingma, Australian basketball player

* 1979 – Tony Stewart, American football player

* 1979 – Islamic revolution of Iran establishes an Islamic theocracy under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In a major shock to the rest of the world, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to overthrow the oil-rich, well-armed, Westernized and pro-American secular monarchy ruled by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.

The Basij militia founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in November 1979 is composed of 10, 000 regular soldiers, and ultimately draws from about 11 million members, and is subordinate to their Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

* 1979 – Iran hostage crisis: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.

In early 1979, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

< imagemap > File: 1970s decade montage. png | From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after 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 ; 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 in November 1970 ; The Iranian Revolution of 1979 transformed Iran from an autocratic pro-western monarchy to a theocratic Islamist government under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ; The popularity of the disco music genre peaked during the middle to late 1970s .| 420px | thumb

* The Iranian Revolution of 1979 transformed Iran from an autocratic pro-western monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to a theocratic Islamist government under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the newly-born Islamic Republic, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, dramatically reversed the pro-Western foreign policy of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

One of the most famous political uses of cassette tapes was the dissemination of sermons by the Ayatollah Khomeini throughout Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which Khomeini urged the overthrow of the regime of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Ayatollah Abbasali Amid Zanjani ( عباسعلی عميد زنجانی ) is a professor in Law, is known for his strong ties to Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1979 revolution, and had spent time in the Shah's prisons before the Islamic Revolution.

However Time magazine points out those such as Adolf Hitler in 1938, and Joseph Stalin in 1939 and again in 1942, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 have also been granted the title.

As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Ayatollah Khomeini Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caught the CIA and the US very much off guard ( as CIA reporting a mere month earlier predicted no imminent insurrectionary turbulence whatsoever for the Shah's regime ), and resulted in the overthrow of the Shah ( himself a non-democratic ruler ) by a fundamentalist, non-democratic faction opposed to the US, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

After the revolution culminated with the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from France in February 1979, the embassy had been occupied and staff held hostage briefly.

Amid massive protests, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled his country in early 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini soon became the new leader of Iran.

Notable prisoners at Evin before the 1979 revolution include Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani and Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the MEK and the Tudeh Party at first chose to side with the clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini against the liberals, nationalists and other moderate forces within the revolution.

Despite anti-American sentiment in Iran as a result of the 1979 Iranian Revolution against the pro-American shah and an accompanying breakdown in relations with the new Ayatollah Khomeini government over the Iran hostage crisis, the Reagan administration reached out to the anti-communist Khomeini in an effort to recruit the theocracy into the American camp in the early 1980s.

The Iranian Revolution ( also known as the Islamic Revolution or 1979 Revolution ; Persian: انقلاب اسلامی, Enghelābe Eslāmi orانقلاب بیست و دو بهمن ) refers to events involving the overthrow of Iran's monarchy ( Pahlavi dynasty ) under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution.

The Shah left Iran for exile on January 16, 1979 as the last Persian monarch and in the resulting power vacuum two weeks later Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran to a greeting by several million Iranians.

On February 1, 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in a chartered Air France Boeing 747.

Ayatollah Khomeini stated that " 60, 000 men, women and children were martyred by the Shah's regime ," but estimates compiled by a researcher ( Emad al-Din Baghi ) at the Martyrs Foundation ( Bonyad Shahid ) come to only 2, 781 killed in the 1978 and 1979 clashes between demonstrators and the Shah's army and security forces.