istoryworld
Events relating to north america
George Cukor directs Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born
US truck driver Elvis Presley makes his first commercial recordings, for Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee
Elia Kazan directs James Dean in East of Eden
Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway
Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis forms his own quintet, extending it in 1958 to a sextet
The first Disneyland opens in California, an event watched on television by 90 million Americans
James Dean is type-cast as the young lead in Rebel without a Cause
Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York
Baptist pastor Martin Luther King leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks is arrested for not giving up her seat to a white man
Heartbreak Hotel, Presley's first recording for RCA, goes to the top of all three US charts
Jerome Robbins creates the ballet The Concert, to music by Chopin
The musical My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, opens on Broadway
The first true synthesizer is put on the market by RCA Victor
English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylvia Plath
The husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames design a much copied lounge chair and footstool, made of moulded plywood with padded leather cushions
Russian dancer Galina Ulanova proves a sensation on tour in Europe and the USA in her late forties
The USA and Britain withdraw their offer of financial aid for Nasser's Aswan dam
Eugene O'Neill's searing account of tensions within his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night, has its premiere in Stockholm
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is prosecuted and acquitted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl
Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected for a second US presidential term, again with Richard Nixon as his vice-president
US novelist John Cheever publishes The Wapshot Chronicle, depicting a wealthy and eccentric family in Massachusetts
Fred Hoyle, William Fowler, and Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge explain stellar nucleosynthesis
US novelist Mary McCarthy describes the religious pressures she grew up with in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Jack Kerouac publishes a largely autobiographical novel, On the Road, describing his experiences travelling through the US and Mexico
In Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky proposes the revolutionary theory that humans inherit an innate universal grammar
