Events relating to america
James Dean is type-cast as the young lead in Rebel without a Cause
A military uprising in Argentina forces Perón to resign and go into exile
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
Anastasio Somoza is assassinated on a visit to Panama, but the dictatorship of Nicaragua remains in his family
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
Communist activist Fidel Castro returns from Mexico to Cuba to organize guerrilla warfare against the Batista regime
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
John Diefenbaker heads a minority government in Canada, ending twenty-two years of Liberal rule
Barbadian cricketer Garfield Sobers, playing in Kingston, Jamaica, against Pakistan, makes a record Test score of 365 not out
US paratroops enforce desegregation in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas