 Text search
 Related images
 HistoryWorld
 Link
 Map
Click the icons to visit linked content. Hover to see the search terms |
|  |
| | | | World History timeline |
| | | | | | |
| 1949 |
| | | The technique of radiocarbon dating is developed by US chemist Willard Libby | |
| |
|
| 1949 |
| | | Robert Menzies returns as Australia's prime minister, and remains in the post for an unbroken sixteen years | |
| |
|
| 1949 |
| | | Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) sets up a new Republic of China in Taiwan, vowing to recapture the rest of the nation in due course | |
| |
|
| 1949 |
| | | The Dutch concede independence for Indonesia with Achmed Sukarno as president | |
| |
|
| 1949 |
| | | Batavia reverts to its original name of Jakarta and becomes the capital of Indonesia | |
| |
|
| 1949 |
| | | George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother | |
| |
|
| 1949 May 12 |
| | | The Soviet Union lifts the blockade on Berlin and the airlift ends, after providing for nearly a year a lifeline to the city | |
| |
|
| 1949 May 25 |
| | | The Federal Republic of Germany is formed from the British, French and US zones of occupation | |
| |
|
| 1949 May 30 |
| | | The USSR grants nominal independence to east Germany as the newly established German Democratic Republic | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | US state department official Alger Hiss is sentenced to a five-year prison sentence, after being convicted of perjury in a second trial | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | French dramatist Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Prima Donna launches the Theatre of the Absurd | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | In response to the Soviet atom bomb, President Truman announces a crash programme to develop a hydrogen bomb | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | A witch hunt begins when Senator Joseph McCarthy says he knows the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | US evangelist Billy Graham forms the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to take the Christian message to the world | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | A prehistoric victim of strangling is found in Tollund Moss in Denmark, with part of the noose still round his neck | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova form the Festival Ballet, in time for next year's Festival of Britain | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | The Canadian schooner St Roch becomes the first ship to travel through the Panama Canal and the Northwest Passage, thus circumnavigating North America | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | Chinese troops move into Tibet, meeting little resistance | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | Julius Rosenberg is arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, and his wife Ethel is arrested a few weeks later | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | North Korean troops cross the 38th parallel to invade the southern half of the region | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | North Korean forces press far enough south to capture the South Korean capital of Seoul | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | UN troops are sent to defend South Korea, as the invasion from the north rolls on | |
| |
|
| c. 1950 |
| | | Soweto begins to be built outside Johannesburg to segregate the city's black labour force | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | The British government bans hereditary ruler Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland because he has married a white woman | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | Kirsten Flagstad sings the posthumous premiere, in London, of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes his epic account of South America and its people, Canto general | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | UN troops push north across the 38th parallel in a major Korean counter-offensive | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | Incursions by UN troops far into North Korea give China the pretext to enter the war | |
| |
|
| 1950 |
| | | The Medical Research Council in Britain produces a report, by Austin Hill and Richard Doll, linking smoking and lung cancer | |
|  | Tobacco and the doctor's opinion
Wellcome Library, London
|
|
|
| 1950 |
| | | Le Corbusier begins a 15-year project designing Chandigarh as a new joint capital for Punjab and Hariyana | |
| |
|
| 1951 |
| | | US boxer Sugar Ray Robinson beats Jake Lamotta to take the middleweight title (for the first of five times) | |
| |
|
| 1951 |
| | | The Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution prevents anyone being elected for more than two presidential terms | |
| |
|
| 1951 |
| | | Jacopo Arbenz, newly elected president of Guatemala, enrages the USA by expropriating the land of the United Fruit Company | |
| |
|
| 1951 |
| | | Elia Kazan directs Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire | |
| |
|
| 1951 |
| | | Syntex, a small chemical company in Mexico City, develops the first oral contraceptive | |
| |
|
| | | | |