Contemporary

By jennasnider

  • The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco, California

  • World War II ends as Germany and Japan surrender to Allies

  • The United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • Tennesse William's A Streetcar Named Desire premiers

  • The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union begins

  • India and Pakistan granted independence from Great Britain

  • United Nations establishes state of Israel

  • Soviet Union blockades Allied sectors of Berlin

  • Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is produced

  • The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is founded to provide security for its member nations

  • North Korean troops invade South Korea, marking the start of the Korean War

  • Thousands are falsely accused of treason following McCarthy's claims of Communist spies infiltrating the government

  • Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage

  • J.D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye

  • Ralph Ellison publishes Invisible Man

  • Hollywood produces its first feature-length 3D movie to compete with the rising popularity of television

  • The heart-lung machine is invented, creating treatment options for patients with heart defects

  • Francis Crick and James Watson disocver DNA

  • Surpreme Court rules public school segregation to be unconstitutional in Brown vs Board of of Education

  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding is published

  • Rosa Parks is arrested, triggering the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

  • Flannery O' Connor publishes A Good Man is Hard to Find

  • Jorge Luis Borges publishes Extraordinary Tales

  • The first space satellite, Sputnik 1, is launched by the Soviet Union

  • Dr. Albert Sabin develops an oral vaccine for polio

  • Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is published

  • Alaska and Hawaii are admitted to the Union as the 49th and 50th states

  • The U.S. supported Bay of Pigs Invasion fails at over-throwing FIdel Castro

  • Harper Lee wins the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill A Mockingbird

  • East Germany builds Berlin Wall

  • The first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, is launched intp space from Cape Canaveral Space Center in Florida

  • Enviromental protection movent is spurred by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring

  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by ALexander Solzhenitsyn is published

  • President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas

  • Anti-Apartheis leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life imprisonment

  • IBM produces OS-360, the first mass-produced computer operating system

  • 73 million people tune in to watch the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show

  • Mao Zedong launches Cultural Revolution

  • Ariel, Sylvia Plath's last collection of poems, is published in the United States

  • Israel gains territory from Arab states in Six-Day War

  • Christopher Barnard performs the world's first heart transplant; the patient dies 18 days later

  • Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black U,S, Supreme Court justice

  • Martin Luther King, Jr, civil rights leader, murdered in Memphis

  • Kurt Vonnegut publishes his novel Slaughterhouse-Five

  • A long period of violence begins between Catholics and Protestants

  • Astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to set foot on the moon

  • Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th president of the United States