Selected Events for WWII and the 1950s |
| Year | Month | Day | Event | Related Resource |
| 1945 | April | 12 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies of cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House, his summer cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States four times: 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. | Link |
April | 13 | Vice President Harry S. Truman becomes President of the United States. | Link | May | 07 | Unconditional surrender of German forces to the Allies. | | May | 08 | V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. | | June | 26 | The United Nations Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice are signed in San Francisco. | | August | 06 | First atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. | | August | 09 | Second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. | | | 1946 | June | 21 | The United Nations Economic and Social Council establishes the Commission on Human Rights and the Commission on the Status of Women. | |
| 1948 | July | 26 | President Harry S. Truman signs Executive Order 9981, desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces. Order 9981 states, "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." The order also establishes the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. | Link |
December | 10 | The General Assembly of the United Nations adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. | | | 1950 | June | 24 | The Korean War begins when North Korea invades South Korea with 135,000 men. On June 29 the first US ground forces arrive in Korea. | Link |
| 1951 | | | J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye is published. | |
| 1952 | | | Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is published. The novel chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the levels of American racial intolerance and cultural bigotry. | |
| 1953 | January | 22 | The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials written by Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway. Miller's work was inspired by irrational fears of communist infiltration and the investigatory techniques of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. | |
July | 27 | Koren War is over. Armistice signed at Panmunjom. | | | 1954 | May | 17 | In the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court ends federally sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools by ruling unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Brown overturned the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had declared "separate but equal facilities" constitutional, and provided the legal foundation of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. | Link |
| 1955 | December | 01 | Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for violating municipal laws when she does not relinquish her seat on a city bus to a white man. At her trial she is convicted and ordered to pay a fine of $10. She is jailed when she refuses to pay. | Link |
December | 05 | Martin Luther King, Jr. begins the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It continues through 1956. The boycott gives King a position of leadership within the national civil rights movement and demonstrates that nonviolent methods of protest can be effective. | | | 1956 | February | 22 | Heartbreak Hotel enters the charts. The song becomes Elvis Presley's first number 1 Billboard single. | Link |
| 1960 | March | | Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical youth group established in the United States in 1959 that developed out of the youth branch of an older socialist educational organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, holds first organizational meeting. | Link |
