U.S. History Timeline (1940s and 1950s)

On November 25, 1947, they were blacklisted by the major Hollywood producers, who declared publicly that the ten would be fired or suspended and not rehired until they were acquitted or purged of contempt and had sworn that they were not Communists

The Marshall Plan was a program of economic aid to European countries to help them rebuild after WW2

Cargo planes delivered all food, fuel, and other essential goods to the people living in West Berlin during an eleven-month period of the Cold War

The containment policy was a strategic U.S. foreign policy of the late 1940s and early 1950s intended to check the expansionist designs of the Soviet Union through economic, military, diplomatic, and political means. It was conceived by George Kennan soon after World War II.

The United States presidential election of 1948 was the 41st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, successfully ran for re-election against Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee.
The election is considered to be the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that Truman would be defeated by Dewey. Both parties had severe ideological splits, with the far left and far right of the Democratic Party running third-party campaigns. Truman's surprise victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party.

On the morning after the 1948 presidential election, the Chicago Daily Tribune's headline read "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." That's what the Republicans, the polls, the newspapers, the political writers, and even many Democrats had expected. But in the largest political upset in U.S. history, Harry S. Truman surprised everyone when he, and not Thomas E. Dewey, won the 1948 election for President of the United States.

NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was established by the US and Western Europe following World War II. It originally consisted of twelve countries: the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, and Iceland. These countries agreed to come to the aid of any member who was attacked, and represented a common front against any territorial expansion by the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

While the suburbs had originated far earlier; the suburban population in North America exploded during the post-World War II economic expansion. Returning veterans wishing to start a settled life moved en masse to the suburbs. Levittown developed as a major prototype of mass-produced housing. At the same time, African Americans were rapidly moving north for better jobs and educational opportunities than were available to them in the segregated South. Their arrival in Northern cities en masse, in addition to being followed by race riots in several large cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, further stimulated white suburban migration.

They were braceros, which means hired hands. they were allowed to cross the border and go work in the farms since all the men were either off to war or dead.

Groups of people (actors, news reporters, etc) were suspected of being communists - with no basis or foundation for the suspicion. Many people were banned from doing their work because of their suspected communist ties.

The Korean War was a conflict between North Korea and South Korea. (Although a cease-fire and repatriations were made, the war was never ended by treaty.)

It looked for communists and could potentially revoke their citizenship of USA for up to five years. It was vetoed by Truman because it went against constitution and would give communist a strong argument against USA's government

MacArthur wanted to end communism for good by finshing off China while it was still weak.

A hydrogen bomb is, by far, the most destructive weapon that mankind has ever invented. It is the most powerful type of nuclear bomb, in some cases reaching more than 2,000 times the yield of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The first time the principle of a hydrogen bomb was tested was on 9 May 1951 by the United States military, during the “George” test of Operation Greenhouse at the Pacific Proving Grounds.

"I Love Lucy" was one of the most successful television shows in the history of American broadcasting. First broadcast on Monday night, 15 October 1951, on the CBS television network, the show captured the loyalty of millions of viewers with its comic depiction of marital life. The story of its development and its long prime-time run illustrates many of the forces and trends that shaped television in the 1950s.

In the 1950s, Native Americans struggled with the government's policy of moving them off reservations and into cities where they might assimilate into mainstream America. Not only did they face the loss of land; many of the uprooted Indians often had difficulties adjusting to urban life. In 1961 when the policy was discontinued, the United States Commission on Civil Rights noted that for Indians, "poverty and deprivation are common."

The United States presidential election of 1952 was the 42nd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 4, 1952. During this time, Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was escalating rapidly. In the United States Senate, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had become a national figure after chairing congressional investigations into the issue of Communist spies within the U.S. government. McCarthy's so-called "witch hunt", combined with national tension and weariness after two years of bloody stalemate in the Korean War, the Communist Revolution in China, the 1949 Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the early-1950s recession, set the stage for a hotly fought presidential contest.
Unpopular incumbent President Harry S. Truman decided not to run, so the Democratic Party instead nominated Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois; Stevenson had gained a reputation in Illinois as an intellectual and eloquent orator. The Republican Party countered with popular war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower and won in a landslide, ending 20 consecutive years of Democratic control of the White House.

They were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war and executed on June 19, 1953. Their charges were related to the passing of information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

A ceasefire stopped the fighting on July 27, 1953. There was an armistice signed by North Korea, China and the UN but not South Korea. Korea is still split into North Korea, which is communist, and South Korea which is non-communist. The border, protected by a demilitarized zone, was established along the 38th parallel.

When Stalin died in 1953 there was no clear successor to him.The country was initially run by a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov but machinations among the Politburo led to Khrushchev being elected First Secretary of the Party in September of 1953. By 1956 Khrushchev's position was still very weak and he needed to find a way of isolating and removing his political rivals - he couldn't use Stalin's tactics of having them arrested by the NKVD as Beria had been in charge of that and loyalties ran deep. What he decided to do was to present himself as a down to Earth, folksy, peasant. By doing this he sought to isolate Malenkov, a sophisticated man, but seen as a drab bureaucrat - he achieved this by beginning to reform the country, economically, politically as well as culturally.

The Geneva Accords stated that Vietnam was to become an independent nation. Elections were to be held in July 1956, under international supervision, to choose a government for Vietnam. During the two-year interval until the elections, the country would be split into two parts; the North and the South. The dividing line chosen, at the seventeenth parallel a little north of the city of Hue, was quite close to the line that had separated the two halves of Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this was purely a coincidence. This line no longer corresponded to any natural division in Vietnamese society, in economy, political structure, religion, or dialect. It was an arbitrary compromise between French proposals for a line further north and Viet Minh proposals for a line further south.

Rock and roll emerged as a defined musical style in the United States in the early to mid-1950s. It derived most directly from the rhythm and blues music of the 1940s, which itself developed from earlier blues, boogie woogie, jazz and swing music, and was also influenced by gospel, country and western, and traditional folk music. Rock and roll in turn provided the main basis for the music that, since the mid-1960s, has been generally known as rock music.

In 1947, Jonas Salk became the head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He worked on improving the flu vaccine and began to study poliovirus with hopes of creating a vaccine against that disease, as well.

A military alliance of communist nations in eastern Europe. Organized in 1955 in answer to NATO, the Warsaw Pact included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. It disintegrated in 1991, in the wake of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (Public Law 84-627), was enacted on June 29, 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law. With an original authorization of 25 billion dollars for the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of the Interstate Highway System supposedly over a 10-year period, it was the largest public works project in American history through that time.

The United States presidential election of 1956 was the 43rd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 6, 1956. The popular incumbent President, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, successfully ran for re-election. The election was a rematch of 1952, as Eisenhower's opponent in 1956 was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier.

President Eisenhower gave a special message to the congress on the situation in the Middle East during the Suez War to prevent the Soviet Union's attempt to enter Egypt and become an influence. Egypt's president intended to play the US against the Soviet Union in order to build his military power base and influence the Middle East region. The Doctrine failed in a sense but Nasser's deteriorated relationship with the Soviets led the US to switch to policy of accommodation. Now the US has the military influence in the Middle East. Oil was also an influence for the US and its allies.

Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite to successfully achieve earth orbit.

Fideltio Castro Ruz came to power because of the corruption that was taking place under the rule of Fulgencio Batista and with the full blessing of the USA.

Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, and organized as a territory in 1912. It became a state in 1959 along with Hawaii (the 50th state).

Hawaii was annexed as a territory in June of 1898 by an Act of Congress, and became a state on 21 August 1959.

The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and during the leadership of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union. The United States government at first denied the plane's purpose and mission, but then was forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produced its intact remains and surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers, as well as photos of military bases in Russia taken by Powers. Coming roughly two weeks before the scheduled opening of an East–West summit in Paris, the incident was a great embarrassment to the United States and prompted a marked deterioration in its relations with the Soviet Union.