istoryworld
Events relating to north america
The technique of radiocarbon dating is developed by US chemist Willard Libby
US state department official Alger Hiss is sentenced to a five-year prison sentence, after being convicted of perjury in a second trial
In response to the Soviet atom bomb, President Truman announces a crash programme to develop a hydrogen bomb
A witch hunt begins when Senator Joseph McCarthy says he knows the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department
US evangelist Billy Graham forms the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to take the Christian message to the world
The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English
The Canadian schooner St Roch becomes the first ship to travel through the Panama Canal and the Northwest Passage, thus circumnavigating North America
US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd
Julius Rosenberg is arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, and his wife Ethel is arrested a few weeks later
US boxer Sugar Ray Robinson beats Jake Lamotta to take the middleweight title (for the first of five times)
The Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution prevents anyone being elected for more than two presidential terms
Elia Kazan directs Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
German-born US philosopher Hannah Arendt links Hitler's and Stalin's regimes in The Origins of Totalitarianism
Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner open on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I
Catcher in the Rye is US author J.D. Salinger's immensely successful first novel
British-Canadian choreographer Celia Franca founds the National Ballet of Canada
US novelist Carson McCullers publishes a collection of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Café
John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, based on a C.S. Forester story
The first hydrogen bomb is successfully tested by the US at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands
US boxer Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight champion, defeating 'Jersey Joe' Walcott
US author Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man, a Kafkaesque account of a black immigrant's life in New York
Gene Kelly dances a famous routine with an umbrella in the film Singin' in the Rain
Ernest Hemingway publishes The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic struggle between an aged Cuban fisherman and a gigantic marlin
Grace Kelly has her first starring role in High Noon, with Gary Cooper
In his novel East of Eden John Steinbeck develops the biblical theme of Cain and Abel in a family saga set in California
