1954
Dien Bien Phu falls to the Viet Minh
After fifty-five days of siege in a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, the French garrison finally surrendered to General Giap's Viet Minh. It was the first time an Asian guerrilla army had beaten a European colonial power in open battle. France was finished in Indochina. Two decades of American war would follow.
Brown v. Board decision
In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, declaring that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The legal scaffolding of Jim Crow began to crack. Implementation would take years, violence, and the work of a civil rights movement that had been waiting for this door.
Algerian War of Independence begins
The National Liberation Front launched coordinated attacks across French Algeria and issued a proclamation from Cairo demanding sovereignty. Paris responded with hundreds of thousands of troops, systematic torture, and resettlement camps that uprooted millions of rural Algerians. Eight years of savage war would kill several hundred thousand Algerians and bring down the French Fourth Republic.
Bannister runs four-minute mile
On a grass track at Oxford, twenty-five-year-old medical student Roger Bannister finished four laps in three minutes fifty-nine point four seconds. A psychological barrier that doctors and athletes had said was impossible collapsed in under four minutes. Within six weeks an Australian had also done it. The impossible had become routine.
CIA overthrows Arbenz in Guatemala
Worried about United Fruit's banana plantations and land reform, the CIA helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz. The coup ushered in four decades of military rule and civil war that killed perhaps two hundred thousand. A young Argentine named Che Guevara was in Guatemala City and radicalized.
First nuclear submarine launched
The USS Nautilus slid into the Thames River in Connecticut, the world's first nuclear-powered vessel. Her reactor meant she could stay submerged for months. Four years later she became the first ship to reach the North Pole, traveling under the polar ice cap. Naval warfare had acquired a new dimension and a new century of concealment.