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| | | | World History timeline |
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| 1958 |
| | | Charles de Gaulle is elected first President of France's Fifth Republic | |
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| 1958 |
| | | Dictator Fulgencio Batista flees from Cuba, leaving Havana open to Fidel Castro and his victorious guerrillas | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Fidel Castro begins more than four decades of authoritarian rule in Cuba | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Alaska becomes the 49th state of the USA | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 goes into orbit round the sun, between the orbits of Earth and Mars | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Pope John XXIII summons a second Vatican Council | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau collaborate on La Voix Humaine, a concerto for soprano voice and orchestra | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Australian soprano Joan Sutherland becomes a star overnight with her performance at Covent Garden in Lucia di Lammermoor | |
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| 1959 |
| | | The Dalai Lama escapes from Tibet to India after the Chinese suppression of an armed uprising costing thousands of lives | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Alfred Hitchcock directs Cary Grant in North by Northwest | |
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| 1959 |
| | | German novelist Günter Grass has an immediate success with his first novel, The Tin Drum | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Liu Shaoqi replaces Mao Zedong as China's president after the Great Leap Forward fiasco, but Mao remains Chairman | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Vice-president Richard Nixon engages in a 'kitchen debate' with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev at a US exhibition in Moscow | |
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| 1959 |
| | | The Mini is launched, designed by Alec Issigonis, and becomes the best-selling British car of all time | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Lee Kuan Yew becomes the first prime minister of the newly independent state of Singapore | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Billy Wilder directs Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Saul Bellow publishes Henderson the Rain King, in which an American millionaire acquires a strange role in an African tribe | |
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| 1959 |
| | | On the retirement of de Valera, Sean Lemass succeeds him as leader of Fianna F´il and prime minister of Ireland | |
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| 1959 |
| | | The Transkei becomes the first African homeland, or Bantustan, within South Africa | |
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| 1959 |
| | | ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) is formed in Spain as a guerrilla organization to win Basque independence | |
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| 1959 |
| | | The first prototype of the Hovercraft, designed by British engineer Christopher Cockerell, crosses the English Channel | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Achmed Sukarno assumes dictatorial powers, operating an Indonesian policy officially known as Guided Democracy | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Hiroshima Mon Amour is French director Alain Resnais' first feature film, with screenplay by Marguerite Duras | |
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| 1959 |
| | | West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott founds the Trinidad Theatre Workshop | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Keith Waterhouse has a wide success with his second novel, Billy Liar | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Hawaii becomes the 50th state of the USA | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 successfully strikes the moon, in the Palus Putredinus region | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Asterix, written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, makes his first appearance, in the French magazine Pilote | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Solomon Bandaranaike is assassinated by a Buddhist monk after only three years as prime minister of Sri Lanka | |
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| 1959 |
| | | A group of dancers leave the Netherlands Ballet and establish their own Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Soviet spacecraft Luna 3, passing by the moon at a distance of some 40,000 miles, is able to photograph the far side | |
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| 1959 |
| | | The St Lawrence Seaway, a joint Canadian and US project, links the Great Lakes and the sea | |
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| 1959 |
| | | US author William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, an account of the horrors of a junkie's life, is published in Paris | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Harold Pinter's second play in London's West End, The Caretaker, immediately brings him an international reputation | |
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| 1959 |
| | | Rwanda suffers the first nationwide outbreak of Hutu violence against Tutsis | |
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