Timeline of United States history (1950–69)

Updated on Oct 26, 2023

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This section of the Timeline of United States history concerns events from 1950 to 1969.

1950 – Senator Joseph McCarthy gains power, and McCarthyism (1950–1954)

1950 – McCarran Internal Security Act

1950 – Korean War begins

1950 – The comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, is first published

1950 – NBC airs Broadway Open House a late-night comedy, variety, talk show through 1951. Hosted by Morey Amsterdam and Jerry Lester and Dagmar, it serves as the prototype for the The Tonight Show

1950 – Failed assassination attempt by two Puerto Rican nationals on President Harry S. Truman while the President was living at Blair House.

1951 – 22nd Amendment, establishing term limits for President.

1951 – Mutual Security Act

1951 – General Douglas MacArthur fired by President Truman for comments about using nuclear weapons on China

1951 – The first live transcontinental television broadcast takes place in San Francisco, California from the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference. One month later, the situation comedy I Love Lucy premieres on CBS, sparking the rise of television in the American home and the Golden Age of Television.

1951 – See It Now, an American newsmagazine and documentary series broadcast by CBS from 1951 to 1958. It was created by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, Murrow being the host of the show.

1951 – The Catcher in the Rye is published by J. D. Salinger and invigorates the rebellious youth of the period, eventually earning the title of a Classic with its profound impact.

1952 – The debut of the Today show on NBC, originally hosted by Dave Garroway is the fourth longest running talk show on television.

1952 – ANZUS Treaty enters into force

1952 – Immigration and Nationality Act

1952 – United States presidential election, 1952 (Dwight D. Eisenhower elected)

1953 – Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated as President

1953 – Rosenbergs executed

1953 – Korean Armistice Agreement

1953 – Shah of Iran returns to power in CIA-orchestrated coup known as Operation Ajax

1954 – The Tournament of Roses Parade becomes the first event nationally televised in color

1954 - Detonation of 'Bravo' a 15 megaton Hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll. 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, it vapourised three islands, displaced the islanders and caused long lasting contamination.

1954 – Joseph McCarthy discredited in Army-McCarthy hearings

1954 – The CIA overthrows Guatemala's president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (Operation PBSUCCESS)

1954 – Saint Lawrence Seaway Act, permitting the construction of the system of locks, canals and channels that permits ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the North American Great Lakes, is approved

1954 – Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark decision of the Supreme Court, declares state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional

1954 – The U.S. becomes a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (or SEATO) alliance

1954 – Geneva Conference. U.S. rejects the French decision to recognize Communist control of North Vietnam. U.S. increases aid to South Vietnam.

1954 – The People's Republic of China lays siege on Quemoy and Matsu Islands; Eisenhower sends in Navy to demonstrate an invasion of Taiwan would not be permitted

1954 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at an all-time high of 382.74, the first time the Dow has surpassed its peak level reached just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929

1954 – NBC airs the The Tonight Show the first late-night talk show is originally hosted by Steve Allen

1955 – Ray Kroc opens a McDonald's fast food restaurant and, after purchasing the franchise from its original owners, oversees its national (and later, worldwide) expansion

1955 – Rosa Parks incites the Montgomery bus boycott

1955 – AFL and CIO merge in America's largest labor union federation

1955 – Warsaw Pact, which establishes a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe (including the USSR)

1955 – Disneyland opens at Anaheim, California

1955 – Jonas Salk develops polio vaccine

1955 – Rock and roll music enters the mainstream, with "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets becoming the first record to top the Billboard pop charts. Elvis Presley also begins his rise to fame around this same time.

1955 – Actor James Dean is killed in a highway accident

1956 – President Eisenhower secures passages of Interstate Highway Act, which will construct 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of the Interstate Highway System over a 20-year period

1956 – The U.S. refuses to provide military support the Hungarian Revolution

1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.

1956 – Marilyn Monroe marries playwright Arthur Miller.

1956 – Jackson Pollock dies in a car crash

1956 – United States presidential election, 1956 (Eisenhower re-elected)

1956 – "In God We Trust" adopted as national motto

1957 – Eisenhower Doctrine, wherein a country could request American economic assistance and/or aid from military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression from another state

1957 – Civil Rights Act of 1957, primarily a voting rights bill, becomes the first civil rights legislation enacted by Congress since Reconstruction

1957 – Soviets launch Sputnik; "space race" begins

1957 – Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the U.S., goes into service

1957 – Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation

1958 – National Defense Education Act

1958 – NASA formed as the U.S. begins ramping up efforts to explore space

1958 – Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit

1959 – The NBC western Bonanza becomes the first drama to be broadcast in color

1959 – Cuban Revolution

1959 – Landrum–Griffin Act, a labor law that regulates labor unions' internal affairs and their officials' relationships with employers, becomes law

1959 – Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th U.S. states; to date, they are the final two states admitted to the union.

1960s

1960 – U-2 incident, wherein a CIA U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over Soviet Union airspace

1960 – Greensboro sit-ins, sparked by four African American college students refusing to move from a segregated lunch counter, spurs similar actions and increases sentiment in the Civil Rights Movement.

1960 – Civil Rights Act of 1960, establishing federal inspection of local voter registration polls and penalties for those attempting to obstruct someone's attempt to register to vote or actually vote

1960 – National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam formed

1960 – United States presidential election, 1960 (John F. Kennedy elected president)

1961 – US breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba

1961 – Eisenhower gives celebrated "military–industrial complex" farewell address

1961 – John F. Kennedy becomes President

1961 – 23rd Amendment, which grants electors to the District of Columbia

1961 – Peace Corps established.

1961 – Alliance for Progress

1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion

1961 – Alan Shepard pilots the Freedom 7 capsule to become the first American in space

1961 – Trade embargo on Cuba

1961 – Berlin Crisis of 1961

1961 – Vietnam War officially begins with 900 military advisors landing in Saigon

1961 – OPEC formed

1962 – Trade Expansion Act

1962 – John Glenn orbits the Earth, becoming the first American to do so

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis, which becomes the closest nuclear confrontation (as of 2010) involving the U.S. and USSR

1962 – Baker v. Carr, enabling federal courts to intervene in and to decide reapportionment cases

1962 – Engel v. Vitale, which determines that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and require its recitation in public schools

1962 – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

1962 – Marilyn Monroe dies of an apparent overdose from acute barbiturate poisoning at 36.

1963 – Bob Dylan and Columbia Records release The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (his second studio album), which becomes a classic

1963 – Atomic Test Ban Treaty

1963 – March on Washington; Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Have a Dream" speech

1963 – The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan published, sparking the women's liberation movement

1963 – President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas; Lyndon Johnson becomes President. The man accused of assassinating President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, is shot and killed as he is led to jail by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The assassination marks the first 24-hour coverage of a major news event by the major networks.

1964 – The Beatles arrive in the U.S., and subsequent appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, mark the start of the British Invasion (or, an increased number of rock and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular around the world, including the U.S.)

1964 – Tonkin Gulf incident; Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

1964 – 24th Amendment, prohibiting both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax

1964 – President Johnson proposes the Great Society, whose social reforms were aimed at the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched later in the 1960s.

1964 – Economic Opportunity Act

1964 – Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing major forms of discrimination against blacks and women, and ended racial segregation in the United States

1964 – Panama Canal Zone riots

1964 – United States presidential election, 1964

1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson escalates the United States military involvement in the Vietnam War

1965 – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights activist group, led the first of several anti-war marches in Washington, D.C., with about 25,000 protesters

1965 – Immigration Act of 1965

1965 – Voting Rights Act

1965 – Medicaid and Medicare enacted

1965 – Higher Education Act of 1965

1965 – Malcolm X an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist is assassinated in Harlem, New York

1965 – The Watts riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, lasts six days and is the first of several major urban riots due to racial issues.

1966 – Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established

1966 – Department of Transportation created

1966 – National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act

1966 – Miranda v. Arizona establishes "Miranda rights" for suspects

1966 – Feminist group National Organization for Women (NOW) formed

1966 – The three major American television networks—NBC, CBS and ABC—have full color lineups in their prime-time schedules.

1966- Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (formerly known as Cassius Clay) declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to go to war. According to a writer for Sports Illustrated, the governor of Illinois called Ali "disgusting" and the governor of Maine said that Ali "should be held in utter contempt by every patriotic American." In 1967 Ali was sentenced to 5 years in prison for draft evasion, but his conviction was later overturned on appeal. In addition, he was stripped of his title and banned from professional boxing for more than three years.

1967 – Jack Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism, secondary to bronchogenic carcinoma (lung cancer), on January 3, 1967 at Parkland Hospital, where Oswald had died and where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead after his assassination.

1967 – The first Super Bowl is played, with the Green Bay Packers defeating the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10.

1967 – Detroit race riot precipitates the "Long Hot Summer of 1967", when race riots erupt in 159 cities nationwide.

1967 – The "Summer of Love" embodies the growing counterculture, with the Monterey Pop Festival and Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" among the highlights.

1967 – 25th Amendment establishes succession to the Presidency and procedures for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President

1967 – American Samoa becomes self-governing under a new constitution

1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

1968 – The National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam launches the Tet Offensive

1968 – Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act

1968 – New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, after winning the California primary for the Democratic Party's nomination for President, by Sirhan Sirhan.

1968 – Shirley Chisholm becomes first black woman elected to U.S. Congress

1968 – Police clashes with anti-war protesters in Chicago, outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention

1968 – U.S. signs Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

1968 – United States presidential election, 1968 (Richard Nixon elected president)

1969 – Richard Nixon is inaugurated as President

1969 – "Vietnamization" begins

1969 – Stonewall riots in New York City marks the start of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S.

1969 – Chappaquiddick incident, where Sen. Edward M. Kennedy drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne

1969 – Neil Armstrong walks on the Moon

1969 – The Woodstock Festival in White Lake, New York becomes an enormously successful musical and cultural gathering; a milestone for the baby-boom generation

1969 – Warren E. Burger appointed Chief Justice of the United States to replace Earl Warren

1969 – U.S. bombs North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia and Laos

1969 – Sesame Street premieres on National Educational Television.

References

Timeline of United States history (1950–69) Wikipedia

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