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The International Monetary Fund IMF begins to operate.
IMF had grown to 39 members. On 1 March 1947, the IMF began its financial operations, and on 8 May France became the first country to borrow from it. -
The start of the Cold War
A period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. -
Roswell UFO incident
Recovery of balloon debris from a ranch near Corona, New Mexico by United States Army Air Forces officers from Roswell Army Air Field -
Gandhi assassinated
In an effort to end India's religious strife, he resorted to fasts and visits to the troubled areas. He was on one such vigil in New Delhi when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist who objected to Gandhi's tolerance for the Muslims, fatally shot him -
President Truman signed the Act that became known as the Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred over $13 billion in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
U.S. President Truman signs Executive Order 9981
This ended racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces -
North Atlantic Treaty Organization established
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. -
Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb.
The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan. -
Communists forces gain power in China; nationalists flee to Taiwan.
Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the PRC; Chiang and his forces fled to Taiwan to regroup and plan for their efforts to retake the mainland. -
United States - Great Brinks Robbery.
The Great Brink's Robbery was an armed robbery of the Brink's Building at the east corner of Prince St. and Commercial St. in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1950. Today the building is a parking garage located at 600 Commercial Street. -
Diners Club issues the first credit cards.
Founded by Frank McNamara in 1950, the Diners' Club Card was among the country's earliest charge cards. Before the time of plastic credit cards or digital payments, being freed from carrying an excessive amount of cash by simply presenting you Diners' Club card was novel. -
Korean War begins when North Korea invaded South Korea
After five years of simmering tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when the Northern Korean People's Army invaded South Korea in a coordinated general attack at several strategic points along the 38th parallel, the line dividing communist North Korea from the non-communist Republic -
Congress passes 22nd Amendment
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once. -
General Douglas MacArthur relieved of command in Korea.
President Truman fired MacArthur and replaced him with Gen. Matthew Ridgway. On April 11, Truman addressed the nation and explained his actions. -
U.S. President Harry Truman declares an official end to war with Germany
President Harry Truman finally proclaims that the nation's war with Germany, begun in 1941, is officially over. Fighting had ended in the spring of 1945. Most Americans assumed that the war with Germany had ended with the cessation of hostilities six years earlier. -
56 million watch Richard Nixon's "Checker's speech" on TV.
Delivered by then-Senator Nixon on the evening of September 23, 1952, in a dramatic attempt to answer charges that he abused a political expense fund, the half-hour address was the first American political speech to be televised live for a national audience and was watched or heard by some 60 million people. -
US explodes first thermonuclear bomb at Enewetak Island
Ivy Mike was detonated on November 1, 1952, by the United States on the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll -
President-elect Dwight Eisenhower follows through with his campaign promise to visit Korea
Why did Eisenhower travel to Korea?
Eisenhower goes to Korea to see whether he can find the key to ending the bitter and frustrating Korean War. During the presidential campaign of 1952, Republican candidate Eisenhower was critical of the Truman administration's foreign policy, particularly its inability to bring an end to the conflict in Korea. -
Joseph Stalin dies. Georgi Malenkov becomes Soviet Premier
How did Joseph Stalin really die?
He died suddenly in early March 1953 after a short illness, which was described in a series of medical bulletins in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. Based on both the clinical history and autopsy findings, it was concluded that Stalin had died of a massive hemorrhagic stroke involving his left cerebral hemisphere. -
East Berliners rise against Communist rule; quelled by tanks
Workers in East Berlin rose in protest against government demands to increase productivity. Within days, nearly a million East Germans joined the protests and began rioting across hundreds of East German cities and towns. -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union
who were convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets, are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining -
Dien Bien Phu, French military outpost in Vietnam, falls to Viet Minh army
Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the decisive engagement in the First Indochina War (1946–54). It consisted of a struggle between French and Viet Minh (Vietnamese Communist and nationalist) forces for control of a small mountain outpost on the Vietnamese border near Laos. -
Brown v. Board of Education
Topeka the Supreme Court unanimously bans racial segregation in public schools -
Army v. McCarthy inquiry; Senate votes in Dec. to condemn Sen. McCarthy for misconduct.
The U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct unbecoming of a senator. The condemnation, which was equivalent to a censure, related to McCarthy’s controversial investigation of suspected communists in the U.S. government, military and civilian society. -
Nikolai A. Bulganin becomes Soviet premier, replacing Malenkov
Malenkov was forced to resign in February 1955 after he came under attack for abuse of power and his close connection to Beria (who had been executed as a traitor in December 1953). -
President Eisenhower suffers coronary thrombosis in Denver
During his first term as President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered several serious illnesses. Particularly important was the massive heart attack he experienced in the fall of 1955. -
Rosa Parks refuses to sit at the back of the bus, breaking Montgomery, Ala., segregated seating law
In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation laws. -
Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of USSR Communist Party, denounces Stalin's excesses
Khrushchev’s secret speech, (February 25, 1956), in Russian history, denunciation of the deceased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made by Nikita S. Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. -
Autherine Lucy, the first black student at the University of Alabama, is suspended after riots
of Alabama, Dies at 92. Her career there lasted only three days; attacked by mobs, she was suspended and then expelled. Today, a campus building is named in her honor. -
U.S. tests the first aerial hydrogen bomb over Namu islet, Bikini Atoll with the force of 10 million tons TNT
The United States conducts the first airborne test of an improved hydrogen bomb, dropping it from a plane over the tiny island of Namu in the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. -
Eisenhower Doctrine calls for aid to Mideast countries that resist armed aggression from Communist-controlled nations
Eisenhower on January 5, 1957, within a "Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East". Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, a Middle Eastern country could request American economic assistance or aid from U.S. military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression. -
The "Little Rock Nine" integrate Arkansas high school. Eisenhower sends troops to quell mob and protect the students after Gov. Orval Faubus defies federal order
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. -
Russia launches Sputnik I, first earth-orbiting satellite—the Space Age begins
the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. The satellite, an 85-kilogram (187-pound) metal sphere the size of a basketball, was launched on a huge rocket and orbited Earth at 29,000 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour) for three months. -
Army's Jupiter-C rocket fires first US satellite, Explorer I, into orbit
The Jupiter-C was an American research and development vehicle developed from the Jupiter-A. Jupiter-C was used for three unmanned sub-orbital spaceflights in 1956 and 1957 to test re-entry nosecones that were later to be deployed on the more advanced PGM-19 Jupiter mobile missile -
Eisenhower orders US Marines into Lebanon at request of President Chamoun, who fears overthrow
The United States feared that the region was susceptible to the spread of communism. The Eisenhower Doctrine was announced by President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1957. It pledged American economic and military aid to prevent communism from spreading in the Middle East. -
The US Supreme Court rules unanimously that Little Rock, Ark., schools must integrate
a unanimous Supreme Court declined a Little Rock School District request to delay by more than two years the desegregation mandated by the Court's 1954 Brown v. Board ruling. -
Alaska and Hawaii becomes the 49th and 50th states.
The admission of a state brings with it new electoral votes and new representatives in Congress. The Democrats during the 1950s favored Alaska as the 49th state, while the Republicans wanted Hawaii admitted by itself, with both sides believing there was a political benefit to the admissions process. -
Cuban President Batista resigns and flees
A New Year's Eve party, Batista told his cabinet and top officials that he was leaving the country. After seven years, Batista knew his presidency was over, and he fled the island in the early morning. -
Fidel Castro assumes power
Castro assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister. -
American U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, shot down over Russia
The U-2 incident was a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that began with the shooting down of a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union in 1960 and that caused the collapse of a summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. -
John F. Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon in a closely-fought presidential race.
United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. In a closely contested election, Democratic United States Senator John F. Kennedy defeated the incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee. -
Communist China and Soviet Union split in conflict over Communist ideology.
The Sino-Soviet split was the breaking of political relations between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union caused by doctrinal divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War -
US breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba
The United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 3, 1961, citing unwarranted action by the Government of Cuba that placed crippling limitations on the ability of the United States Mission to carry on its normal diplomatic and consular functions. -
1,200 US-sponsored anti-Castro exiles invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, covertly financed and directed by the U.S. government. -
USSR detonates 50-megaton hydrogen bomb in the largest man-made explosion in history
the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed was set off over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea. The Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' had a yield of 50 megatons, or the power of around 3,800 Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously. -
Cuban Missile Crisis: USSR to build missile bases in Cuba
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba -
Pat Brown defeats Richard Nixon in the California gubernatorial race.
The so-called "last press conference" of Richard Nixon took place on November 7, 1962, following his loss to Democratic incumbent Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. -
Cuba releases 1,113 prisoners of 1961 invasion attempt
After failing to raise the ransom amount demanded by Fidel Castro as reparations, the prisoners were released in exchange for $53,000,000 worth of food and medicine. -
France and West Germany sign treaty of cooperation ending four centuries of conflict
Germany and France signed the “Aachen Treaty,” a bilateral friendship treaty on cooperation and integration. The treaty comes fifty-six years after the signing of the Élysée Treaty, which focused on reconciliation after the end of the Second World War. -
Martin Luther King delivers "I have a dream" speech
"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. -
President Kennedy shot and killed in Dallas, Tex. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President same day
John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. -
Nelson Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa
South African anti-apartheid leader and world human rights activist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 12, 1964 for his political activism by the South African establishment. -
Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution after North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attack US destroyers
the U.S. Congress authorized Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to take any action necessary to deal with threats against U.S. forces and allies in Southeast Asia. -
Khrushchev is deposed; Kosygin becomes premier and Brezhnev becomes first secretary of the Communist Party
By the early 1960s however, Khrushchev's popularity was eroded by flaws in his policies, as well as his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This emboldened his potential opponents, who quietly rose in strength and deposed him in October 1964 -
The first US combat troops arrive in Vietnam.
By the end of the year, 190,000 American soldiers are in Vietnam. -
France withdraws its Atlantic fleet from NATO.
France also withdrew its Atlantic and Channel fleets from NATO command. The rift deepened on 10 March 1966, when General de Gaulle officially announced that France intended to withdraw from the Alliance and demanded that all NATO bases be removed from French territory. -
Rhodesia unilaterally declares its independence from Britain
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) was a statement adopted by the Cabinet of Rhodesia on 11 November 1965, announcing that Southern Rhodesia or simply Rhodesia, a British territory in southern Africa that had governed itself since 1923, now regarded itself as an independent sovereign state. -
Charles De Gaulle calls for United States forces to leave Vietnam.
De Gaulle said that negotiations toward a settlement of the war could begin as soon as the United States committed to withdrawing its troops by a certain date. -
President De Gaulle visits the USSR
Charles de Gaulle in a foreign State. During this trip, he visited, in addition to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Novosibirsk. This visit served French and Soviet interests. -
India suffers the worst famine in 20 years.
No significant increase in the number of infant deaths from famine was found in the Bihar drought. The annual production of food grains had dropped in Bihar from 7.5 million tonnes in 1965–1966 to 7.2 million tonnes in 1966–1967 during the Bihar drought. There was an even sharper drop in 1966–67 to 4.3 million tonnes.