The 50's

• Cold War, Korean War

•  They see this as a time when "everything was right" in America, a period in which the United States really fulfilled its destiny as the leader of the world in all respects that mattered.

• Average price was between 8 and 10 thousand dollars

• About $3000 a year, which was $250 per month. Which indicated a rise from the great depression (1930'S) but there was lower spending and credit that in the roaring 20's (1920's).

Elvis Presley- Jailhouse Rock

World Events During the 1950s & 60s 

1950

• North Korea invades South Korea and captures Seoul in the first weeks of the conflict. At the United Nations, the Soviet Union is boycotting proceedings, so the U.S. is able to push through a resolution to fight back against North Korea. The Korean "Conflict" begins with U.S. General Douglas MacArthur as commander of U.N. troops. He is able to stop the Communist advance, land troops at Inchon and push the North Koreans almost to the Chinese border. In November 1950, the Chinese invade and push UN troops half way back down the peninsula.
• Nationalist China leader Chiang Kai-shek establishes an anticommunist government on the island of Taiwan (Formosa) after being defeated on the mainland.
• The Soviet Union begins putting nuclear missiles on submarines.
• U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin tells President Truman that the State Department is infiltrated with communists and communist sympathizers. This initiates a period of witch hunts and blacklists.
• Former U.S. State Department official Hiss is convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. He was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948.
• Israel's new "Law of Return" grants automatic citizenship to any immigrant Jews from around the world. Iraq's Jewish community migrates to Israel, as do many others. The Arab League institutes an economic boycott of Israel.
• Palestinian refugee camps are set up overseen by the UN Relief and Works Agency. They are given a budget of just $27 per person.
• The postwar baby boom dramatically increases birthrates in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.
• There are 1.5 million television sets in the U.S. this year. By 1951, there are 15 million – ten times as many in one year. By 1960, Americans own 85 million TV sets. In 1950, CBS broadcasts the first TV program in color.
• The Diner's Club card is introduced and becomes the first "credit card" accepted at multiple retail establishments.

1951

• General Douglas MacArthur is relieved of his command by President Truman after the General criticized Truman's policy of limiting the war to the Korean Peninsula. A stalemate in the Korean Conflict begins to take shape.
• The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is passed, limiting the president to a maximum of two terms in office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to four terms beginning in 1932. He died within months of beginning his fourth term. He was the first and only president to be elected to more than two terms.
• The UNIVAC is introduced as the first commercial computer. It's sold by Remington Rand, a typewriter maker. It gains fame by crunching the numbers that allow pollsters to predict the winner of the 1952 presidential election.
• Electric power is produced from the first atomic power reactor in Arcon, Idaho. The U.S. tests nuclear weapons in Nevada and the South Pacific throughout the 50s.
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death for espionage against the U.S. for selling classified information about the atomic bomb to the Russians. They are executed in 1953.
• Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed coins the term "rock-and-roll."

1952

• Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president of the United States, the first Republican president in 20 years. Richard Nixon is his Vice-President.
• King George VI of England dies, and he is succeeded by his young daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.
• Japan regains official independence, ending over six years of American occupation. Japan and the U.S. put into effect a security treaty that makes these former enemies into allies.
• Israel and Germany agree on restitution for damages done to Jews by the Nazis before and during World War II.
• Mother Teresa opens the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta, India.

1953

• The Korean War ends after three years of inconclusive fighting. An armistice is signed and the boundary between North and South Korea is drawn at the 38th parallel.
• Nikita Khrushchev is appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party after Joseph Stalin dies. He will rule the Soviet Union through the most turbulent years of the Cold War. He was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964.
• The Soviet Union detonates its first hydrogen bomb with much more power than the atomic bomb.
• Cambodia gains independence from France. Next door, the French fight to hold onto Vietnam.
• Heavy flooding in Holland kills 2,000 people.
• The Shah of Iran is returned to power in a coup that is supported by the U.S. and Great Britain. The former prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, had taken over western-owned oil companies and was becoming a Soviet ally.
• Cigarette smoking is reported to cause lung cancer for the first time.
• British physicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson publish their famous paper on the double-helix structure of DNA, the material in chromosomes that control heredity.
• Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain.

1954

• U.S. President Eisenhower formulates the domino theory that says that once one country falls to a communist regime others in the region will be vulnerable, too. It is this theory that will be invoked by President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam.
• The Brown v. Board of Education decision is handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court saying that "separate but equal" school systems are unconstitutional. An era of desegregation of schools is instituted.
• A rebellion against French colonial rule begins in Algeria. It will last for eight years before Algeria wins independence.
• Vietnamese communists take Dien Bien Phu and occupy Hanoi, forcing a complete French withdrawal from Indochina. In July, at a conference in Geneva, the country is divided into North and South Vietnam along the 17th parallel.
• The U.S. enters into the SEATO Treaty, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, to oppose communism in Asia. The mutual defense organization included Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand, Pakistan, France, England and the U.S. The treaty was disbanded in 1977.
• China's Yangtze River overflows, killing 40,000 and forcing 10 million people to evacuate.
• First human trials of "the pill" oral contraceptive for women.
• RCA introduces the first color TV sets, and NBC begins regular broadcasts in color.
• The U.S. launches the first nuclear powered submarine, the Nautilus.

1955

• Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister in England and is defeated for re-election.
• The Soviet Union and its satellite communist regimes in Eastern Europe ratify the Warsaw Pact. Later, Churchill calls this act the equivalent of forming an "Iron Curtain" across Europe. The Cold War deepens.
• Rosa Parks, an African American woman, is arrested after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest sparks a bus boycott led by local minister Martin Luther King, Jr., and sets the American civil rights movement in motion.
• Sony – then known as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering – produces the first pocket-size transistor radio. Before that, all radios had to have tubes and were large, heavy machines.

1956

• Dwight Eisenhower reelected as President of the United States. That same year, he signs the Interstate highway into law.
• Nikita Khrushchev tells Western ambassadors, "We will bury you." He also begins "de-Stalinization," releasing millions of political prisoners and liberalizing Soviet politics. Still, Soviet troops invade Hungary to crush an uprising against the Communist government there.
• The second Arab-Israeli war is fought after Egypt seizes the Suez Canal from the British. Israeli invades Egyptian territory east of the Canal with British and French help. However, eventually the UN declares the canal Egyptian property.
• Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic.
• Former colonies gain independence – Sudan from England, and Tunisia and Morocco from France.
• Elvis Presley releases the first of more than 170 hit songs, "Heartbreak Hotel."
• American movie star Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco.

1957

• The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik satellite, the first man-made object to orbit the earth. About the same time, the Soviets test their first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that's capable of delivering nuclear warheads in minutes to the U.S.
• North Vietnam, through the Viet Cong, begins a guerilla war against South Vietnam.
• Arkansas governor Orval Faubus calls the National Guard to prevent nine African American students from integrating Little Rock's Central High School. He defies the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
• Martin Luther King, Jr., forms the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to promote nonviolent solutions to segregation.
• Ghana gains independence from Great Britain.
• In the U.S. the baby boom peaks as 4.3 million Americans are born, the highest number in 30 years. During the 50s, 29 million babies are born.
• The British allow women to become members of the House of Lords for the first time.

1958

• The U.S. and Canada develop NORAD, a radar system close to the North Pole to detect and provide the U.S. with an early warning of a Soviet missile attack.
• In Cuba, Fidel Castro launches a revolution against the Batista government. Batista flees in 1959, and Castro becomes premier of Cuba.
• The European Economic Community – also called the Common Market – is begun to give Europe the same economic leverage as the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
• Iraq's King Faisal is assassinated by the army. Iraq becomes a republic, withdraws from the Baghdad Pact and allies itself with the Soviets.
• The former colonies of Madagascar, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa gain their independence but maintain ties to the French Community.
• NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is founded and starts the Mercury project to take the first Americans into space.
• Charles de Gaulle is elected president of France, in large part because he is in favor of allowing former colonies gain independence. He proposes the creation of the French Community giving former colonies the right to independence.

1959

• Fidel Castro installs the first communist regime in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. breaks off diplomatic relations in 1961.
• In Vietnam, the first U.S. noncombatant military advisers die in a Viet Cong attack. In 1961, the U.S. agrees to supply South Vietnamese troops.
• Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th states in the United States.
• Yasser Arafat establishes the militant Arab group al-Fatah that is dedicated to building a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.
• Xerox introduces the first commercial photocopier to the market.
• American Airlines launches the jet age in the U.S. transportation industry with the first transcontinental flights with a Boeing 707 aircraft.
• The Soviet Union's unmanned Luna 2 rocket reaches the moon. This same year, the U.S. launches into space and safely retrieves two monkeys.
• Albert Sabin develops a live-virus polio vaccine that can be taken orally and offers longer immunity than the Salk vaccine.

During the 1950s in the United States, manufacturing and home construction were on the rise as the American economy was on the upswing. The Korean War and the beginning of the Cold War created a politically conservative climate in the country, and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States played out through the entire decade. Fear of communism caused public Congressional hearings by both houses in Congress and anti-communism was the prevailing sentiment in the United States throughout the decade. Conformity and conservatism characterized the social mores of the time. The 1950s in the developed Western world are generally considered both socially conservative and highly materialistic in nature. The beginning of decolonization in Africa and Asia occurred in this decade and accelerated in the following decade of the 1960s. TheLibrary of Congress has dubbed the 1950s as the decade with the least musical innovation. The 1950s are noted in United States historyas a time of both compliance and conformity and also, to a lesser extent, of rebellion. Major U.S. events during the decade included: TheKorean War (1950–1953); The Second World War hero and retired Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower as President in 1952 and his subsequent re-election in 1956; The Red Scare and anti-communist concerns of the McCarthy era; The U.S. reaction to the 1957 launch by the Soviet Union of the Sputnik satellite, a major milestone of the Cold War

Civil rights movement

Main article: African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)

The civil rights movement began in earnest, with the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. In the early 1950s the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States opened the door to the beginnings of the right for all Americans to an equal and fair education regardless of race, creed or religion. During this time, racial segregation was still present in the U.S. and other countries. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s would soon begin. Key figures like Martin Luther King, Jr.,Malcolm X and Rosa Parks highlighted and challenged those who were against equal rights and freedoms for black Americans. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine integrated the Central High School, which was a key event in the fight to end segregation in schools and other public places in the U.S. These developments among others would be key talking points in the advancement of equal rights across the world over the years to come.

Science and technology

• The Miller-Urey experiment showed in 1953 that under simulated conditions resembling those thought to be possible to have existed shortly after Earth was first created, many of the basic organic molecules that form the building blocks of life are able to spontaneously form.
• Francis Crick, and James D. Watson, discovered the helical structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1953.
• Bruce C. Heezen discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
• The first polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, was introduced to the general public in 1955.
• The first organ transplants were done in Boston and Paris in 1954.
• The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy.
• Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957. The US then launched Explorer 1 three months later, beginning the space race.
• Fortran, perhaps the single most important milestone in the development of programming languages, was developed at IBM.
• The Kinsey Reports were published.
• NASA is organized.

Popular culture and mass media

• The popularity of television skyrocketed, particularly in the US, where 77% of households purchased their first TV set during the decade.^[10]
• The social mores about sex were particularly restrictive, characterized by strong taboos and a nervous attitude for prudish conformity, to the point that even the softcore pornography of the time avoided describing it.^[11] The social mores of the decade were marked by overall conservatism and conformity.
• Juvenile delinquency was said to be at epidemic proportions in the United States, although by modern standards the crime rate was low.^{[citation needed]}
• Optimistic visions of a semi-utopian technological future, including such devices as the flying car, were popular.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still hits movie theaters launching a cycle of Hollywood films in which Cold War fears are manifested through scenarios of alien invasion or mutation.
• Resurgence of evangelical Christianity including Youth for Christ (1943); the National Association of Evangelicals, the American Council of Christian Churches, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (1950),Conservative Baptist Association of America (1947); and Campus Crusade for Christ (1951). Christianity Today was first published in 1956. 1956 also marked the beginning of Bethany Fellowship, a small press that grew to be a leading evangelical press.
• Carl Stuart Hamblen, a religious radio broadcaster, hosted the popular show "The Cowboy Church of the Air".
• Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine in 1953.

1950		Senator Joseph McCarthy gains power, and McCarthyism (1950–1954) begins
		McCarran Internal Security Act
		Korean War begins
		The comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, is first published
		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 Tonight Show
		Failed assassination attempt by two Puerto Rican nationals on President Harry S. Trumanwhile the President was living at Blair House.
1951		22nd Amendment, establishing term limits for President.
		Mutual Security Act
		General Douglas MacArthur fired by President Truman for comments about using nuclear weapons on China
		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.
		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.
1952		The debut of the Today show on NBC, originally hosted by Dave Garroway is the fourth longest running talk show on television.
		ANZUS Treaty enters into force
		Immigration and Nationality Act
		United States presidential election, 1952 (Dwight D. Eisenhower elected)
1953		Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated as President
		Rosenbergs executed
		Armistice in Korea
		Shah of Iran returns to power in CIA-orchestrated coup known as Operation Ajax
1954		The Tournament of Roses Parade becomes the first event televised nationally in color
		Joseph McCarthy discredited in Army-McCarthy hearings
		The CIA organizes the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (Operation PBSUCCESS)
		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
		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
		The U.S. becomes a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (or SEATO) alliance
		Geneva Conference, with the U.S. attempting to find a way to unify Korea, and to discuss the possibility of restoring peace in Indochina
		The People's Republic of China lays siege on Quemoy and Matsu Islands; Eisenhower sends in Navy
		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
		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
		Rosa Parks incites the Montgomery Bus Boycott
		AFL and CIO merge in America's largest labor union
		Warsaw Pact, which establishes a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe (including the USSR)
		Disneyland opens at Anaheim, California
		Jonas Salk develops polio vaccine
		Rock and roll music enters the mainstream, with "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets becoming the first record to top the Billboard magazine pop charts. Elvis Presleyalso begins his rise to fame around this same time.
		Actor James Dean is killed in a highway collision on his way to a racetrack in Salinas, California, while driving his racing Porsche 550 Spyder.
1956		Interstate Highway Act, which would provide the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of the Interstate Highway System over a 20-year period
		The U.S. refuses to support the Hungarian Revolution
		Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
		Marilyn Monroe marries playwright Arthur Miller.
		Jackson Pollock dies in a car crash in Springs, New York
		United States presidential election, 1956 (Eisenhower re-elected)
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
		Civil Rights Act of 1957, primarily a voting rights bill, becomes the first civil rights legislation enacted by Congress since Reconstruction
		Soviets launch Sputnik; "space race" begins
		Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the U.S., goes into service
		Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation
1958		National Defense Education Act
		NASA formed as the U.S. begins ramping up efforts to explore space
		Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit
1959		The NBC western Bonanza becomes the first drama to be broadcast in color
		Cuban Revolution
		Landrum-Griffin Act, a labor law that regulates labor unions' internal affairs and their officials' relationships with employers, becomes law
		Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th U.S. states; to date, they are the final two states admitted to the union.

American political leaders

President Harry S. Truman Vice President Alben W. Barkley President Dwight D. Eisenhower Vice President Richard Nixon Senator John F. Kennedy Senator Lyndon B. Johnson Governor Adlai Stevenson Senator Everett Dirkson Senator Hubert H. Humphrey Senator Barry Goldwater Governor Averill Harriman Senator Mike Mansfield Senator Estes Kefauver

Chief Justice Earl Warren Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn U.S. Representative Gerald R. Ford Governor Nelson Rockefeller Senator Jacob Javits Senator Ernest McFarland Justice Hugo Black Justice William O. Douglas Justice Felix Frankfurter Senator John McClellan Robert F. Kennedy Ronald Reagan Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover

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