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American presidential election held on Nov. 2, 1948, in which Democratic Pres. Harry S. Truman defeated Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman won the election with 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. -
Joe McCarthy was a Senator from Wisconsin. He was best known for his work chairing the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which focused on suspected communists in the government. He even investigated the Voice of America, He was known for his brutal interrogations of suspects, resulting in ruining the lives of both guilty and innocent people. -
On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The announcement ended the costly full-scale civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party. -
On March 6, 1951 their trial began in New York's Southern District federal court. The trial lasted for nearly one month. They were charged with conspiracy and providing atomic secrets to the USSR. -
On July 10, 1951, peace talks began between the U.N. and North Korea in the village of P’anmunjom, just north of the future Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). At the center of the talks would be the question of prisoners-of-war. -
Queen Elizabeth II became queen on February 6, 1952, and was crowned on June 2, 1953. Queen Elizabeth II is the sixth Queen to have been crowned in Westminster Abbey in her own right. -
On May 10, 1953 Roy hit a double and a home run in a game against the Phillies at Ebbets Field. With those two hits, Campy drove in all five runs in the Dodgers’ 5-0 victory. -
On April 12, 1954— Bill Haley and His Comets recorded “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock.” If rock and roll was a social and cultural revolution, then “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” was its Declaration of Independence. -
On May 7, 1954, the French-held garrison at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam fell after a four month siege led by Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the French pulled out of the region. -
Disneyland, Walt Disney's metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opens on July 17, 1955. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits. -
The Suez Crisis began on October 29, 1956, when Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) nationalized the canal, a valuable waterway that controlled two-thirds of the oil used by Europe. -
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. -
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education. On September 4, 1957, the first day of classes at Central High, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students’ entry into the high school. -
On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 successfully launched and entered Earth's orbit. Thus, began the space age. The successful launch shocked the world, giving the former Soviet Union the distinction of putting the first human-made object into space. The word 'Sputnik' originally meant 'fellow traveler,' but has become synonymous with 'satellite' in modern Russian. -
The 1958 Major League Baseball season was played from April 14 to October 15. It was the first season of play in California for the Los Angeles Dodgers (formerly of Brooklyn) and the San Francisco Giants (formerly of New York City). -
On May 13, 1959, Arthur Melin applied for a patent for his version of the hula hoop. He received U.S. Patent Number 3,079,728 on March 5, 1963, for a Hoop Toy. Twenty million Wham-O hula hoops sold for $1.98 in the first six months. -
On May 28, 1959, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency lifted two monkeys into space on a suborbital mission in a Jupiter missile nose cone to test physiological reactions to spaceflight. -
On May 1, 1960, the pilot of an American U-2 spyplane was shot down while flying though Soviet airspace. The fallout over the incident resulted in the cancellation of the Paris Summit scheduled to discuss the ongoing situation in divided Germany, the possibility of an arms control or test ban treaty, and the relaxation of tensions between the USSR and the United States. -
On April 17, 1961, 1,400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. -
A federal court ordered “Ole Miss” to admit him, but when he tried to register on September 20, 1962, he found the entrance to the office blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. -
On October 11, 1963, Malcolm X gave a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in which he outlined the philosophy of black nationalism as promoted by the Nation of Islam and declared racial separatism as the best approach to the problems facing black America. Most of that speech appears below. -
1965 The Supreme Court rules in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples have a Constitutional right to privacy that includes the right to use birth control. However, millions of unmarried women are still denied birth control. -
On August 15, 1969, one of the most celebrated music festivals in history took place in a field in Bethel, NY. What followed was beyond anything anyone could have predicted. The cultural phenomenon no one foresaw transformed an ordinary field into a historic landmark where legendary performers played to more than 450,000 people. -
The return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran on February 1, 1979, marked a turning point in Iranian history. Millions of followers turned out in Tehran to greet Khomeini as he arrived from Paris, where he had spent 14 years in exile as an outlawed cleric. -
On June 18, 1983, NASA Astronaut Sally K. Ride became the first American woman in space, when she launched with her four crew mates aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-7. Ride and five other women had been selected in 1978 for NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first American selection class to include females. -
On May 20, the government formally declared martial law in Beijing, and troops and tanks were called in to disperse the dissidents. -
On September 5, 1989, President George H. W. Bush took to the airwaves from the Oval Office to address the nation about what he said was a grave domestic threat. “This is the first time since taking the oath of office that I felt an issue was so important, so threatening that it warranted talking directly with you, the American people,” he said. “This is crack cocaine, seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House,”