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The Hiss Affair
Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official. Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that -
Book burning in Nazi Germany
Campagn conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. -
Development of new technologies
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. Around the 1920’s is when it all started. -
Developments and incidents involving the atomic bomb
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.The test used an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed "The Gadget", of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. -
The Cold War
The Cold War was a state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact). Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common. It was termed as "cold" because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars in Korea,Vietnam and Afghanistan that the tw -
Peace Treaty ending WWII
The victorious wartime Allied powers (principally the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France) negotiated the details of the peace treaties with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland following the end of WW2 in 1945. -
Blacklisting in the entertainment industry
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-20th-century practice of denying employment to screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals because of their suspected political beliefs or associations. Artists were barred from work on the basis of their alleged membership in or sympathy with the Communist Party and refusal to assist investigations into the party's activities. -
Loyalty Oath Controversy at University of California
In 1949, during the Cold War, the Board of Regents of the University of California imposed a requirement that all University employees sign an oath affirming not only loyalty to the state constitution, but a denial of membership or belief in organizations (including Communist organizations) advocating overthrow of the United States government. -
Korean War
25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953. The Korean War was a war between North and South Korea, in which a United Nations force led by the United States of America fought for the South, and China fought for the North, which was also assisted by the Soviet Union. The war arose from the division of Korea at the end of World War II and from the global tensions of theCold War that developed immediately afterwards. -
Rise of suburbia/Levittown, PA
The majority of the land on which it is built was purchased in 1951. The brothers Bill Levitt and architect Alfred Levitt designed its typical houses. Construction of Levittown began in February 1952, soon after completion of Levittown, New York, located on Long Island. Levittown, Pennsylvania was the second "Levittown" built by William J. Levitt, who is often credited as the creator of the modern American suburb. -
Comic book bans in the 1950s
The Comics Code Authority was formed in 1954 by the Comics Magazine Association of America as an alternative to government regulation, to allow the comic publishers to self-regulate the content of comic books in the United States. -
The McCarthy Hearings
McCarthy made a dramatic accusation that was a crucial mistake: in early 1954, he charged that the United States Army was “soft” on communism. McCarthy was indignant because David Schine, one of his former investigators, had been drafted and the Army, much to McCarthy’s surprise, refused the special treatment he demanded for his former aide. -
Brown vs. Board of Education, 1951
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facil
