1958
Great Leap Forward begins in China
Mao ordered peasants to smelt steel in backyard furnaces, pool their farms into gigantic communes, and kill sparrows for eating grain. The result was the worst famine in human history. Perhaps thirty to forty-five million Chinese starved to death while party cadres reported record harvests. Mao retreated into the shadows for a few years.
Integrated circuit demonstrated
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently figured out how to put multiple transistors on a single slice of silicon. The chip had been born. Within a decade Noyce would found Intel and begin the long march to a computer on every desk, and eventually in every pocket.
De Gaulle returns to power in France
With Algeria threatening to topple the Fourth Republic and army officers in open revolt, French politicians summoned General Charles de Gaulle back from retirement at his country estate. He wrote a new constitution creating the powerful presidency of the Fifth Republic and was elected its first president by a landslide. He would spend the next four years gradually extracting France from Algeria.
Iraqi revolution
Iraqi army officers led by Abdul Karim Qasim overthrew the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in a bloody coup. King Faisal II and his family were shot in the palace garden. The pro-Western regime in Baghdad was gone. Iraq would pass through a series of coups before finally ending up, in 1968, under the Baath Party that produced Saddam Hussein.
United Arab Republic formed
Egypt and Syria, riding the wave of Arab nationalism, merged into a single state called the United Arab Republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser. The union was supposed to be the seed of a pan-Arab state stretching from Morocco to Iraq. It fell apart after three years when Syrian officers staged a coup. Pan-Arabism never quite recovered.