istoryworld
USA timeline
President Truman defines postwar US policy by pledging support for any nation defending itself against Communism
Marlon Brando stars on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named Desire
Saxophonist 'Bird' Parker forms his own quintet in New York, often to be heard at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem
Baseball-player Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American in a major league team
US artist Jackson Pollock's drip paintings cause a stir in New York
The first transistor is produced in the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey
US zoologist Alfred Charles Kinsey publishes some unexpected findings in his Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male
The Cello Sonata by US composer Elliott Carter introduces 'metric modulation'
Norman Mailer has immediate succes with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his military service in the Pacific
US poet Theodore Roethke publishes The Lost Son, his second collection
US novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coins a term for his contemporaries, the Beat Generation
In the title of a new book US mathematician Norbert Wiener popularizes a term that he has coined, Cybernetics
George Marshall, the US secretary of state, launches a plan to distribute aid to sixteen European countries
John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a film based on B. Traven's novel of 1927
A 200-inch telescope goes into service at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California
US lawyer Alger Hiss is denounced, controversially, as a Soviet spy
US psychologist B.F. Skinner trains laboratory rats to use their brains in his 'Skinnner box'
US president Harry S. Truman wins election to the office in his own right
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set up by the USA and Canada, together with Britain and other European countries, for purposes of collective security
Annie Allen, by US author Gwendolyn Brooks, describes in narrative verse the life of a black girl in contemporary USA
Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York
The musical South Pacific, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway
US architect Philip Johnson builds the Glass House in Connecticut in the International Style
Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin star as three US sailors on shore leave in the screen version of On the Town
The technique of radiocarbon dating is developed by US chemist Willard Libby
