Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The 1950s (pronounced nineteen-fifties; commonly abbreviated as the "Fifties" or the "' 50s") (among other variants) was a decade that began on January 1, 1950, and ended on December 31, 1959. Throughout the decade, the world continued its recovery from World War II , aided by the post-World War II economic expansion .
In early 1950s, the Soviet Union, having reconstructed the ruins left by the war, experienced a decade of prosperous, undisturbed, and rapid economic growth, with significant and remarkable technological achievements most notably the first earth satellite. The nation made it to the top 15 countries with highest GDP per capita in the mid-1950s.
Beatniks and the Beat Generation, an anti-materialistic literary movement whose name was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948 and stretched on into the early-mid-1960s, was at its zenith in the 1950s. [74] Such groundbreaking literature from the beats includes William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
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, and the Nashville sit-ins, spur similar actions and increases sentiment in the Civil Rights Movement.
In its heyday during the 1950s and '60s, it was a haven for wealthy summer vacationers, attracting the best comedians — including Mel Brooks, Danny Kaye, and Jackie Mason — to its stages and ...
The period also saw great population growth with increased birth rates and the emergence of the baby boomer generation. Despite this recovery, the Cold War developed from its modest beginnings in the late 1940s to a heated competition between the Soviet Union and the United States by the early 1960s.
The term baby boom refers to a noticeable increase in the birth rate. The post-World War II population increase was described as a "boom" by various newspaper reporters, including Sylvia F. Porter in a column in the May 4, 1951, edition of the New York Post, based on the increase of 2,357,000 in the population of the U.S. from 1940 to 1950.
The BBC's early television service was given a major boost in 1953 with the coronation of Elizabeth II, attracting a worldwide audience of twenty million, plus tens of millions more by radio. Many middle-class people bought televisions to view the event. In 1950 just 1% owned television sets; by 1965 25% did, and many more were rented.