Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) becomes world heavyweight champion for the first time, defeating Sonny Liston

US physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover cosmic background radiation, lending strong support to the Big Bang theory

US poet John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs introduce Henry, his alter ego

Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead takes its title from the last poem, about modern disregard for a Civil War monument

Fiddler on the Roof, based on a novel by Sholom Aleichem, opens on Broadway with Zero Mostel playing Tevye the Milkman

President Johnson pushes through a Civil Rights Act against strong Senate opposition

Peter Sellers plays three different roles in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

US author Joyce Carol Oates publishes her first novel, With Shuddering Fall

US author Saul Bellow publishes Herzog, a novel featuring a professor of history who is a compulsive sender of messages

Martin Luther King wins the Nobel Peace Prize for leading non-violent resistance to racial discrimination in the USA

Lyndon B. Johnson is elected US president in his own right, winning decisively against Republican Barry Goldwater

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, is the world's longest suspension bridge with a main span of 4260 feet (1298m)

Black activist and convert to Islam Malcolm X is assassinated when giving a speech in the Audubon Ballroom in New York

The first communications satellite, Early Bird, is launched from Cape Carnaveral

Woody Allen makes his screen debut with What's New Pussycat?

Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple is produced in New York

Ralph Nader begins a long career in consumer protection with Unsafe at Any Speed, attacking the US automobile industry

18-year-old Austrian body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes Junior Mr Europe (on his way to Mr World and Mr Universe)

An exhibition in New York, 'The Responsive Eye', puts op art on the map

President Johnson introduces affirmative action as a legislative policy to redress social inequalities

US choreographer Robert Joffrey founds a new company that becomes known (from 1977) as the Joffrey Ballet

US author Randall Jarrell's poem The Lost World provides the title for his last published book

Riots break out in the Watts area of Los Angeles

Based on interviews given to Alex Haley in 1964, a life of Malcolm X is published soon after his assassination

Scientists at the US Geological Survey develop the theory of plate tectonics as the explanation of continental drift