1959
Castro takes Havana
After two years of guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra, twenty-six-year-old Che Guevara and thirty-two-year-old Fidel Castro rolled into Havana in army jeeps. Batista had fled before dawn with suitcases of cash. Crowds filled the Malecon. Within two years the revolution would nationalize American property and turn to Moscow. Cuba became Cold War ground zero.
Dalai Lama flees Tibet
After a Tibetan uprising in Lhasa, the twenty-three-year-old Dalai Lama disguised himself as a soldier and slipped out of his palace at night. He crossed the Himalayas on horseback to India, where he would spend the rest of his life in exile at Dharamsala, leading a Tibetan community, and becoming a global moral figure.
Alaska and then Hawaii join the Union
Alaska was admitted as the forty-ninth state in January, Hawaii as the fiftieth in August. The American flag, its stars rearranged, now covered territory from the Arctic Circle to the tropics. It was the first time since 1912 that new stars had been added, and the last time in the twentieth century.
Buddy Holly dies in plane crash
After a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, twenty-two-year-old Buddy Holly, seventeen-year-old Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper climbed into a small plane in a snowstorm. It went down in an Iowa cornfield minutes later. Rock and roll lost its sweetest songwriter. Don McLean would later call it the day the music died.
Alaska joins the Union
Alaska became the forty-ninth state of the United States, a vast, largely empty, resource-rich territory that had been purchased from Russia in 1867 for seven million dollars. The US now extended into the Arctic. Hawaii would follow as the fiftieth state later that year. The shape of the nation was fixed.