1950
Korean War begins
At dawn North Korean tanks rolled across the thirty-eighth parallel and drove south. Within days they had Seoul. The United Nations, with the Soviet delegate conveniently boycotting, authorized armed response. American troops rushed from Japan to a peninsula most Americans could not find on a map. Three years of war would kill three million people.
McCarthy's Wheeling speech
Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin waved a piece of paper at a Republican women's luncheon and claimed to have the names of two hundred and five Communists in the State Department. He had no such list, but the speech launched four years of accusations that ruined careers, fed a national paranoia, and gave the era its name.
Population explosion begins
Global population passed two point five billion. Falling infant mortality and improved food supply meant a population boom was starting. Demographers and policy-makers began to worry about carrying capacity, resources, and family planning. Over the next half century the earth would add more people than in all of prior human history.
China enters Korean War
As American forces pushed toward the Yalu River, three hundred thousand Chinese People's Volunteers crossed into Korea at night and surprised General MacArthur. Within weeks they had driven the UN back past Seoul. The war froze into a bloody stalemate along the thirty-eighth parallel that has not quite ended seventy-five years later.
China invades Tibet
Thirty thousand People's Liberation Army troops crossed the Yangtze and overwhelmed Tibet's small, poorly armed forces in a campaign Beijing called a peaceful liberation. The young Dalai Lama was pressured into signing a Seventeen-Point Agreement ceding sovereignty to China. Tibet would keep its name on the map and lose almost everything else, from its monasteries to its autonomy, over the next decade.
MacArthur lands at Inchon
In a daring amphibious assault behind North Korean lines, American forces under Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon, outflanking the North Koreans and cutting off their supply lines. Within weeks the UN forces had pushed back to the thirty-eighth parallel and beyond. It was the high-water mark of American fortunes in the Korean War, before Chinese troops changed everything.