In the year 1988...
- The bloody Iran-Iraq War comes to an end after eight years of fighting and 1.5 million deaths when the two sides accept the terms of a UN-mandated cease-fire.
- On December 7, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake rocks Armenia and is immediately followed by a magnitude 5.8 aftershock, killing 25,000, injuring 15,000, and leaving 517,000 homeless.
- Typhoons in Bangladesh cause severe flooding, killing over 100,000 people.
- President Saddam Hussein crushes the latest autonomy movement among Iraqi Kurds, unleashing poison gas attacks and rounding up and executing male Kurds at random, killing some 200,000 Kurds in all.
- In Burma a military junta called The State Law and Order Council, or SLORC, seizes power and imprisons democratically elected president Aung San Suu Kyi. Thousands of students and pro-democracy advocates demonstrate and organize an armed resistance under Htun Aung Gyaw, but are brutally supressed. The junta renames the nation Myanmar and moves the capital to Rangoon.
- On July 3, a US warship patrolling the Persian Gulf mistakenly shoots down an Iranian civilian aircraft, killing all 290 people on board.
- On December 21, Pan Am Flight 103 crashes near Lockerbie, Scotland as a result of a terrorist bomb, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
- Polish labor activist Lech Walesa leads a series of nationwide strikes that will lead in the following year to the inclusion of his Solidarity party in the previously closed Polish political system.
- In Germany, a bank robbery degenerates into a hostage situation. Fleeing across the country with two hostages, the two bank robbers are eventually apprehended, but one of the hostages, 18-year-old Silke Bischoff, dies in the shootout, shocking Europeans unaccustomed to such violence.
- A mission by the space shuttle Discovery marks first America's manned space flight since the Challenger disaster in 1986.
- Italian Cardinal Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero reluctantly announces that the Shroud of Turin does not contain the image of Christ after scientists from three prominent universities independently carbon-date samples from the shroud to between 1260-1390.
- At the Seoul Summer Olympic Games, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson runs a new world record 9.79 seconds in the 100 meters, but is disqualified and striped of both his gold medal and his record after testing positive for anabolic steroids.
- An injured Kirk Gibson hits one of the most memorable home runs in baseball history, smashing a two-run blast with two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning against A's pitching ace Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the Major League Baseball World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- Physicist Stephen Hawking publishes A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, explaining the universe in layman's terms.
- Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical The Phantom of the Opera debuts on Broadway.
These people were born in 1988:
These people died in 1988:
1987 - 1988 - 1989