nm - I tried to post a mildly NSFW URL and can’t figure out how to break the URL.
Battle of New Orleans was the first think that came to my mind.
Which they STOLE from the Smothers Brothers!
I knew about thalidomide from college, anthropology maybe? Also I had a good friend whose mother had one of those babies… well before either of us were born though.
Nearly everything I know about Kent State and Vietnam I learned from Doonesbury 
I was inspired to learn the history of the bra from Bette Midler, while not an earthshaking historical event, those of us with “vast tracts of land” do appreciate significane of it. I did look up the Edmund Fitzgerald as well.
Nope! Smothers Brothers didn’t steal it. They were w-a-a-a-y later than Kingston Trio. Kingston Trio actually stole it from someone else. I have the vinyl of the Kingston Trio.
“Bloody Sunday” in Ireland because of U2.
The Zoot Suit Riots in LA in 1943: “Zoot Suit Riot” by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and “Hey, Pachuco!” by Royal Crown Revue.
I first learned about the Messerschmidt 262 from the Blue Oyster Cult song M.E. 262.
Similarly, I would never have known abou the Brighton beach riots if not for the Who’s Quadrophenia.
It was Counting Crows’ song Richard Manuel Is Dead that informed me that Richard Manuel was dead (and lead me to learn who Richard Manuel was).
Alestorm’s cover of Flower of Scotland taught me about the Battle of Bannockburn.
Would have known without the song:
The Red Baron
Eva Peron
Edsel
Panmunjom
Thalidomide
Bernie Goetz
Kent State shootings
Whiskey Rebellion
Battle of Borodino
Babylonian Captivity
Year Without a Summer (but I keep forgetting the name of the volcano)
Pepin the Hunchback (but I had heard of Pepin the Short, which should be enough for full credit)
Acadian Diaspora
Adm. Fisher
Gen. Guderian
Tiger tank
Brutal treatment of returning Russian soldiers
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
Basque separatists
Rep. of Rhodesia
French Revolution
Palace of Versailles
Jean-Paul Marat
Teapot Dome scandal (but maybe not all other Harding administration scandals)
Rasputin
The Bismarck
Kiev
Brandenburg
Sherman’s March, etc
Charlotte Corday
Battle of New Orleans
Buddy Holly
Battle of Passchendaele
James brothers
Mason-Dixon Line
Columbus/1492
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (There are a few people still alive who read the newspapers back in the 1960s)
James K. Polk (he got us Texas, California, and a few other states)
Buffalo Soldiers
Battle of Britain
Alexander the Great
Flight of Icarus
Sioux wars
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Sacco and Vanzetti
Rodney King
Nero (now generally considered not to have fiddled)
Waterloo
Ma Barker
Paul Revere
Clear Lake Iowa plane crash
Zoot Suit Riots
Messerschmitt 262
Battle of Bannockburn
Would not have known without the song (highly questionable notability in size 1 tpye):
The Edmund Fitzgerald
Sir Richard Grenville
Bloody Sunday
Casey Jones
Plane crash at Los Gatos
Tom Dula (aka Dooley)
Roddy McCorley
1948 Boston mayoral campaign
Stagger Lee
Frances Farmer
Joe Hill
Wreck of the Old 97
Springhill mining disaster
1833 Leonid meteor shower
Ira Hayes
1927 Mississippi flood
Battle of the Beanfield
Anti-Massacre Movement
Brighton beach riots
Richard Manuel
Unsure if would have known without song/poem:
Battle of Baltimore
Tripoli operation
Alaskan Gold rush
Battle of Balaclava
oops repeat
When I was a kid in day camp, we used to sing this song on the bus:
*Oh they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue,
And they thought they built a ship that the water couldn’t go through.
But the Good Lord raised his hand and said the ship would never land.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Etc.
*
I came in to mention that.
The worst part is that there’s real doubt about whether he was innocent, whether or not racism played a role. So the song rather gives a dubious account of things.
Nope. It’s thalidomide. Thalidomide was a sedative which was commonly prescribed to pregnant women in the late 50s to early 60s in order to treat symptoms of morning sickness. It was withdrawn in 1961 when it was found to cause severe congenital birth defects in babies born to women who had been prescribed or given thalidomide. It was quite the scandal and led to more rigorous testing of drugs before they could be approved for sale.
It was approved for sale in the UK, Germany, and Canada, among other nations. It had not been approved in the U.S., however millions of tablets had been distributed to doctors in a clinical testing program, who gave them out to their patients.
Guernica.
I knew about it, but I wonder how many Siouxsie & the Banshee fans first heard about Mt. Vesuvius destroying Pompeii from their song “Cities In Dust.”
Lyrics
Music video
Audio only (much better quality)
So many of these are fascinating but this especially so to me. Thanks for the links. I knew who Rasputina since they started, but for some reason I had never heard that song. I hadn’t heard of the historical event either, though I knew of some of the results, such as Frankenstein.
I learned more about that navigating, masturbating, son-of-a-bitch, Columbo from Christopher Columbus by R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders featuring Leila Jane Dornacker (noted helicopter passenger and actress (the mysterious Nurse Murch in The Right Stuff)) than I learned about him in school!
(Very NSFW, and unfortunately clipped short, YouTube video here.)
CMC fnord!
I think the winner of this thread is Nelson Mandela. Be honest, if you knew who he was before 1984 or so you were probably South African. The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” brought his plight into the public’s consciousness, at least in the UK. There ended up being a big concert in his honor and Simple Minds also did a song. Now by the late 80s everyone knew who he was but Jerry Dammers may have indirectly set the mechanism in motion toward his release.
I didn’t know who Leonard Pelletier was until I heard Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Crazy Life.”
Apparently, there was a mining disaster in New York, according to the Bee Gees. I have never heard this song but I’ve seen it enough on compilations, etc. that I think, “what an odd topic for a song.”
And a little wikipedia research reveals that the song is actually about the Aberfan mining catastrophe of 1966. If you need nightmare fuel read up on this. Over 100 young kids died. 
Well there’s always the 1999 film which may just have introduced it to a lot of people:
But I guess you could argue that without the song there’d never have been the film.