istoryworld
Events relating to america
Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York
The musical South Pacific, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway
US architect Philip Johnson builds the Glass House in Connecticut in the International Style
The first Soviet atomic bomb, called by the Americans Joe One, is successfully tested in Kazakhstan
Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin star as three US sailors on shore leave in the screen version of On the Town
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
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes his epic account of South America and its people, Canto general
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
Jacopo Arbenz, newly elected president of Guatemala, enrages the USA by expropriating the land of the United Fruit Company
Elia Kazan directs Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
Syntex, a small chemical company in Mexico City, develops the first oral contraceptive
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
The Batllistas, followers in Uruguay of José Batlle, attempt an unusual experiment in the reform of government
