istoryworld
Events relating to america
William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker dramatizes the extraordinary story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opens in New York after seventeen years of work on the project
US film director Jules Dassin makes Never on Sunday, starring the Greek actress Melina Mercouri
Guatemala is terrorized by government-linked death squads and emergent guerrilla groups
Soviet forces shoot down a US high-altitude U-2 spy plane and capture the pilot, Gary Powers
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, discovered in Buenos Aires, is kidnapped by Israeli agents
US jazz saxophonist John Coltrane forms his own 'hard bop' group
20-year-old Spanish tenor Placido Domingo sings his first major role, as Alfredo in La Traviata in the Mexican city of Monterrey
The Colossus is US author Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems
The Brazilian government moves to Brasilia, into public buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer
The Quiet Revolution in Quebec begins with the election of Jean Lesage and the Liberals
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is the first of many collections of poems by US poet Charles Bukowski
The birth control pill wins FDA approval in the US and goes on sale
US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird
Alfred Hitchcock directs Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho
US novelist John Barth publishes The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque life of Edmund Cook set on a family tobacco plantation in Maryland
US author John Updike begins to chart the fictional progress of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, in Rabbit, Run
Democrat candidate John F. Kennedy defeats Republican Richard Nixon in the US presidential election
President Kennedy appoints his younger brother Robert to the position of US attorney-general
Political activist Jane Jacobs publishes an influential polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
President Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps, enabling US volunteers to work abroad
J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family
An invasion force of about 1500 Cuban exiles comes ashore in Cuba's Bay of Pigs in an attempt to topple the Castro regime
Two days after landing in the Bay of Pigs, 114 Cuban exiles are dead and about 1300 have been captured
US astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space, with a suborbital flight in Freedom 7
