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| | | | World History timeline |
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| 1953 |
| | | New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stand together on the top of Everest | |
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| 1953 |
| | | US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem | |
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| 1953 |
| | | English composer William Walton writes Orb and Sceptre for the coronation of Elizabeth II | |
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| 1953 |
| | | The new queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, is crowned like all her predecessors since 1066 in Westminster Abbey | |
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| 1953 |
| | | US abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning exhibits his series Women nos I-VI, on which he has been working since 1938 | |
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| 1953 |
| | | William Wyler directs Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, a beguiling comedy about a princess's romance in Rome | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Dmitry Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony has its first performance in Leningrad nine months after the death of Stalin | |
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| 1953 |
| | | US citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sent to the electric chair as convicted spies | |
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| 1953 |
| | | South African author Nadine Gordimer publishes her first novel, The Lying Days | |
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| 1953 |
| | | French composer Olivier Messiaen uses birdsong with piano and orchestra in his Waking of the Birds | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Anglican vicar Chad Varah, using the crypt of a London church, sets up the first branch of what becomes the Samaritans | |
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| 1953 |
| | | French actor Jacques Tati directs and stars in the zany comedy Mr Hulot's Holiday | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Swedish economist Dag Hammarskjöld becomes secretary-general of the United Nations | |
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| 1953 |
| | | US golfer Ben Hogan wins the US Open, the US Masters and the British Open in a single year | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Within the year Marilyn Monroe stars in Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire | |
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| 1953 |
| | | The two Rhodesias and Nyasaland are merged in the self-governing Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism | |
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| 1953 |
| | | An armistice ends the Korean War, leaving several million dead and a country divided either side of a military zone along the 38th parallel | |
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| 1953 |
| | | The first Soviet hydrogen bomb is successfully tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan | |
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| 1953 |
| | | The Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh is removed from office in an armed coup sponsored by the CIA and Britain's MI6 | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Improved methods of testing prove conclusively that Piltdown Man was constructed by Charles Dawson from a human skull and the jaw of an ape | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Cambodia wins independence from the colonial power, France | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria is executed by the new Soviet regime | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Merce Cunningham forms his own company of dancers, initially at Black Mountain College in North Carolina | |
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| 1953 |
| | | Molecular biologists Francis Crick and James Watson announce their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA | |
|  | Uncle Sam and John Bull knitting DNA, 1990
Wellcome Library, London
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| 1954 |
| | | Baseball star Joe Dimaggio marries Marilyn Monroe, but the marriage lasts only a year | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Senator McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt is broadcast live for several weeks on US television | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Japanese film director Kurasawa Akira directs The Seven Samurai | |
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| 1954 |
| | | J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb', is investigated for Communist sympathies and his security clearance is withdrawn | |
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| 1954 |
| | | The term Domino Theory is coined to reflect President Eisenhower's view of how states might fall to Communism | |
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| 1954 |
| | | A painting by Graham Sutherland, commissioned for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday, does not meet with the full approval of the sitter or his wife | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Bill Haley & His Comets record Rock Around the Clock, providing an early classic of US rock and roll | |
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| 1954 |
| | | The German firm NSU builds the first working example of the rotary engine invented in 1924 by Felix Wankel | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Hungarian photographer Robert Capa is killed by a land mine in Vietnam | |
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| 1954 |
| | | Alfredo Stroessner seizes power in Paraguay, introducing three decades of repressive dictatorship | |
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