June 18, 1988

A Big Mac cost $1.70 that summer of 1988, and the Dow Jones sat at 2,169 — the Soviet Union had recently signed the INF Treaty with the United States, marking the first nuclear arms reduction agreement in history, and everyday Americans were largely focused on gas prices hovering around 95 cents a gallon and planning their summer vacations. At the multiplex, Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America" was drawing long lines, while "The Cosby Show" remained the most-watched program on television for the fourth consecutive season. In June, an estimated 100,000 Estonians gathered for spontaneous mass singing demonstrations across their Soviet-occupied republic, an event that would later be recognized as the beginning of the Singing Revolution — a nonviolent movement in which a nation used its folk song tradition as a direct instrument of political resistance and, ultimately, independence.