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1956
Calendar year From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1956th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 956th year of the 2nd millennium, the 56th year of the 20th century, and the 7th year of the 1950s decade.
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From top to bottom, left to right: Elvis Presley rises to fame with hits like Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, and Don't Be Cruel, sparking a global rock and roll craze; the Suez Crisis erupts after Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, prompting invasion by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom; the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is violently crushed by Soviet forces; the 1956 Summer Olympics take place in Melbourne, Australia, with equestrian events in Stockholm, Sweden; the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision kills 128, prompting air traffic reforms; the Wedding of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and Grace Kelly captivates the world; the 1956 Poznań protests see Polish workers strike against Soviet control; Typhoon Wanda devastates East Asia; and the Cali explosion kills hundreds in Colombia.
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Events
January
- January 1 – The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium ends in Sudan after 57 years.
- January 8 – Operation Auca: Five U.S. evangelical Christian missionaries, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming, are killed for trespassing by the Waorani people of Ecuador, shortly after making contact with them.
- January 16 – Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser vows to reconquer Palestine.
- January 25–26 – Finnish troops reoccupy Porkkala, after Soviet troops vacate its military base. Civilians can return February 4.
- January 26 – The 1956 Winter Olympics open in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
February
- February 2 – Austria and Israel establish diplomatic relations.
- February 11 – British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean resurface in the Soviet Union, after being missing for 5 years.
- February 14–25 – The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is held in Moscow.
- February 16 – The 1956 World Figure Skating Championships open in Garmisch, West Germany.[1]
- February 22 – Elvis Presley enters the United States music charts for the first time, with "Heartbreak Hotel".
- February 23 – Norma Jean Mortenson legally changes her name to Marilyn Monroe.[2]
- February 24 – Doris Day records her most famous song, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)"; it is from Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which Day co-stars with James Stewart.
- February 25 – Nikita Khrushchev attacks the veneration of Joseph Stalin, in a speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", at a secret session concluding the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is not officially made public in the Soviet Union at this time but becomes known in the West in June.
March
- March 1 – The International Air Transport Association finalizes a draft of the radiotelephony spelling alphabet, for the International Civil Aviation Organization.
- March 2 – Morocco declares its independence from France.[3]
- March 9
- The British deport Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus to the Seychelles.
- The Soviet Armed Forces suppress mass demonstrations in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, reacting to Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization policy.
- March 10 – The Fairey Delta 2 breaks the World Air Speed Record, raising it to 1,132 mph (1,822 km/h) or Mach 1.73, an increase of some 300 mph (480 km/h) over the previous record, and thus becoming the first aircraft to exceed 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h) in level flight.
- March 11 – After having opened in London the previous year, Laurence Olivier's film, Richard III, adapted from Shakespeare's play, has its U.S. premiere in theatres and on NBC-TV on the same day. On television it is not shown in prime time, but as an afternoon matinée, in a slightly cut version, one of the first such experiments. Olivier is later nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
- March 12 – 96 U.S. Congressmen sign the Southern Manifesto, a protest against the 1954 Supreme Court ruling (Brown v. Board of Education) that desegregated public education.
- March 13 – Elvis Presley releases his first gold album titled Elvis Presley in the United States.
- March 15 – The Broadway musical My Fair Lady opens in New York City.
- March 19 – At age 48, Dutch boxer Bep van Klaveren contests his last match in Rotterdam.
- March 20 – Tunisia gains independence from France.[4]
- March 21 – The 28th Academy Awards Ceremony is held in Los Angeles. Marty is awarded Best Picture.
- March 23 – Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic, and a national holiday is observed in the country, including the state of East Pakistan.
April
- April 7 – Spain relinquishes its protectorate in Morocco.
- April 9 – Habib Bourguiba is elected President of the National Constituent Assembly of the Kingdom of Tunisia; on April 15 he becomes prime minister.[5]
- April 14 – Videotape is first demonstrated at the 1956 NARTB (modern-day NAB) convention in Chicago, United States, by Ampex. It is the demonstration of the first practical and commercially successful videotape format known as 2" Quadruplex.[6]
- April 18
- American actress Grace Kelly legally marries Rainier III, Prince of Monaco; a religious ceremony follows next day.[7]
- Maria Desylla-Kapodistria is elected mayor of Corfu, becoming the first female mayor in Greece.
- April 19
- British diver Lionel (Buster) Crabb (working for MI6) dives into Portsmouth Harbour, to investigate a visiting Soviet cruiser, and vanishes.
- The 5.0 Mw 1956 Atarfe-Albolote earthquake strikes southern Spain killing 12 and injuring dozens more.
- April 21 – Former U.S. First Daughter Margaret Truman marries Clifton Daniel.
- April 27 – Heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano retires, without losing a professional boxing match.
May
- May 1 – Minamata disease is discovered in Japan.[8]
- May 2
- The United Methodist Church in America decides, at its General Conference, to grant women full ordained clergy status. It also calls for an end to racial segregation in the denomination.
- Violet Gibson, who attempted to assassinate Mussolini in 1926, dies in a mental hospital in England, after a lifetime of imprisonment.
- May 8 – The constitutional union between Indonesia and the Netherlands is dissolved.
- May 9 – Manaslu, eighth highest mountain in the world (in the Nepalese Himalayas) is first ascended, by a Japanese team.
- May 18 – Lhotse main summit, the fourth highest mountain (on the Nepalese–Tibetan border) is first ascended, by Fritz Luchsinger and Ernst Reiss.
- May 23 – French minister Pierre Mendès France resigns, due to his government's policy on Algeria.
- May 24 – The first Eurovision Song Contest is broadcast from Lugano, Switzerland. The winning song is the host country's Refrain by Lys Assia (music by Géo Voumard, lyrics by Émile Gardaz).
- May 25 – India announces the institution of diplomatic relations with Francoist Spain.
June
- June 1 – Vyacheslav Molotov resigns as foreign minister of the Soviet Union; he later becomes ambassador to Mongolia.
- June 4 – Montgomery bus boycott: The related civil suit[9] is heard in federal district court; the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the ruling in November.
- June 5 – The text of Nikita Khrushchev's February attack on Stalin's reputation, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", is first published in the West, in The New York Times.
- June 6 – In Singapore, chief minister David Marshall resigns, after the breakdown of talks about internal self-government in London.
- June 8 – General Electric/Telechron introduces model 7H241 "The Snooz Alarm", the first snooze alarm clock ever.[10]
- June 10 – 1956 Summer Olympics: Equestrian events open in Stockholm, Sweden (all other events are held in November in Melbourne, Australia).
- June 13
- The International Criminal Police Organization adopts Interpol as its official name.
- Real Madrid beats Stade Reims 4–3 at Parc des Princes, Paris and wins the 1955–56 European Cup (football).
- June 14 – The Flag of the United States Army is formally dedicated.[11]
- June 15 – Eindhoven University of Technology is founded in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
- June 18 – The last British troops leave Egypt.
- June 21 – Playwright Arthur Miller appears before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C.
- June 23 – Gamal Abdel Nasser becomes the 2nd president of Egypt, a post he holds until his death in 1970.
- June 28
- Poznań 1956 protests: Labour riots in Poznań, Poland, are crushed with heavy loss of life. Soviet troops fire at a crowd protesting high prices, killing 53 people.
- The film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I, starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, is released only a few months after the film version of R&H's Carousel. It becomes the most financially successful film version of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical up to this time, and the only one to win an acting Oscar (Yul Brynner wins Best Actor for his performance as the King of Siam). It is also one of two Rodgers and Hammerstein films to be nominated for Best Picture (which it does not win).
- June 29
- Actress Marilyn Monroe marries playwright Arthur Miller, in White Plains, New York.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, creating the Interstate Highway System in the United States.[12]
- June 30 – 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision: A TWA Lockheed Constellation and United Airlines Douglas DC-7 collide in mid-air over the Grand Canyon in Arizona, killing all 128 people aboard both aircraft, in the deadliest civil aviation disaster to date; the accident leads to sweeping changes in the regulation of cross-country flight and air traffic control over the United States.
July
- July 2 – A laboratory experiment involving scrap thorium at Sylvania Electric Products in Bayside, New York, results in an explosion.
- July 4 – An American Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft makes its first flight over the Soviet Union.
- July 8 – The mountain Gasherbrum II, on the border of Pakistan and China, is first ascended, by an Austrian expedition.
- July 9 – The 7.7 Mw Amorgos earthquake shakes the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). The shaking and the subsequent tsunami leave 53 people dead.
- July 10 – The British House of Lords defeats the abolition of the death penalty.
- July 13 – John McCarthy (Dartmouth), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Claude Shannon (Bell Labs) and Nathaniel Rochester (IBM) assemble the first coordinated research meeting on the topic of artificial intelligence, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States.
- July 25 – The Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria sinks after colliding with the Swedish ship SS Stockholm in heavy fog 72 kilometers (45 mi) south of Nantucket island, killing 51.
- July 26 – Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal, sparking international condemnation.
- July 30 – A joint resolution of Congress is signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorizing "In God we trust" as the U.S. national motto.
- July 31
- Cricket: Jim Laker sets an extraordinary record at Old Trafford in the fourth Test between England and Australia, taking 19 wickets in a first class match (the previous best was 17).
- Luzhniki Stadium, well known sports venue of Russia and the Soviet Union, officially opens in Moscow.[13]
August
- August 7 – Seven ammunition trucks loaded with 1,053 boxes of dynamite explode in Cali, Colombia. Death estimates range from 1,300 to 10,000, in a city that at this time has 120,000 inhabitants.[14]
- August 8 – 262 miners (chiefly Italian nationals) die in a fire at the Bois du Cazier coal mine, in Marcinelle, Belgium.
- August 9 – Art exhibition This Is Tomorrow opens at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
- August 12 – Around 5,000 members of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church hold a mass outside Cluj-Napoca Piarists' Church to demonstrate that their church, proscribed by the government in 1948, has not ceased to exist as the regime claims.
- August 17 – West Germany bans the Communist Party of Germany.
- The first interfaith dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims with over 850 participants takes place at the monastery of Toumliline in Azrou, Morocco.[15]
September
- September 13
- The hard disk drive is invented by an IBM team, led by Reynold B. Johnson.
- The dike around the Dutch polder East Flevoland is closed.
- September 16 – Television broadcasting in Australia commences.
- September 21 – Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García is assassinated.
- September 25 – The submarine transatlantic telephone cable opens.
- September 27 – The Bell X-2 becomes the first crewed aircraft to reach Mach 3.
October
- October 5 – Cecil B. DeMille's epic film The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses, is released in the United States. It will be in the top ten of the worldwide list of highest-grossing films of all time, adjusted for inflation.[16]
- October 8 – Baseball pitcher Don Larsen of the New York Yankees throws the only perfect game in World Series history, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yogi Berra catches the game. Dale Mitchell is the final out. The New York Yankees win the series in seven games. Larsen is named series MVP.
- October 10
- Finland joins UNESCO.
- The prototype Lockheed L-1649 Starliner, the final Lockheed Constellation model, makes its first flight.
- October 14 – Dalit Buddhist movement (India): B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit leader, converts to Buddhism, along with 500,000 followers.
- October 15 – The British Royal Air Force retires its last Avro Lancaster bomber.
- October 17
- The world's first industrial-scale commercial nuclear power plant is opened at Calder Hall in the UK.[17]
- The Game of the Century (chess): 13-year-old Bobby Fischer beats grandmaster Donald Byrne, in the Rosenwald Memorial Tournament in New York City.
- October 19 – The Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 is signed in Moscow, ending the legal state of war between the Soviet Union and Japan (with effect from December 12) and making possible the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two nations.[18]
- October 23 – The Hungarian Revolution breaks out against the pro-Soviet government, originating as a student demonstration in Budapest. Hungary attempts to leave the Warsaw Pact.
- October 24 – The Protocol of Sèvres, a secret agreement between Israel, France and the United Kingdom, is signed, allowing the former to invade the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and occupy the Suez Canal with the support of the other two governments, giving rise to the Suez Crisis.[19]
- October 26 – Soviet Red Army troops invade Hungary.
- October 29
- Suez Crisis: Israel invades the Sinai Peninsula and pushes Egyptian forces back toward the Suez Canal.
- Tangier Protocol: The international city Tangier is reintegrated into Morocco.
- The Huntley-Brinkley Report debuts on NBC-TV in the United States.
- October 31
- Suez Crisis: The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal.
- A United States Navy team becomes the third group to reach the South Pole (arriving by air), and commences construction of the first permanent Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.
November
- November 1
- The States Reorganisation Act of India reforms the boundaries and names of Indian states. Three new states, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, are formed.
- The film Oklahoma! (1955), previously released to select cities in Todd-AO, now receives a U.S. national release in CinemaScope, since not all theatres are yet equipped for Todd-AO. To accomplish this, the film has actually been shot twice, rather than printing one version in two different film processes, as is later done.
- November 3
- Khan Yunis massacre (Suez Crisis): Israeli soldiers shoot dead hundreds of Palestinian refugees and local inhabitants in Khan Yunis Camp.
- MGM's film The Wizard of Oz is the first major Hollywood film running more than 90 minutes to be televised uncut in one evening, in the United States.
- November 4 – Hungarian Revolution of 1956: More Soviet troops invade Hungary, to crush the revolt that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million leave the country.
- November 6 – 1956 United States presidential election: Republican incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson, in a rematch of their contest 4 years earlier.
- November 7 – Suez Crisis: The United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution calling for the United Kingdom, France and Israel to withdraw their troops from Arab lands immediately.
- November 11 – Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Last insurgents succumb to the invading Soviet army.[20]
- November 12 – Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia join the United Nations.
- November 13 – Browder v. Gayle: The United States Supreme Court declares illegal the state and municipal laws requiring segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, thus ending the Montgomery bus boycott.
- November 14 – An eight-mile long stretch of highway is opened west of Topeka, Kansas, creating the first portion of the Interstate Highway System in the United States and the first highway to be completed with funds from the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.[21]
- November 15 – Middle East Technical University is founded in Ankara, Turkey.
- November 18 – At a reception for Western ambassadors at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev utters his famous phrase "We will bury you".[22]
- November 20 – In Yugoslavia, former prime minister Milovan Đilas is arrested after he criticizes Josip Broz Tito.
- November 22 – The 1956 Summer Olympics begin in Melbourne, Australia.
- November 23 – The Suez Crisis causes petrol rationing in Britain.[23]
- November 25 – Fidel Castro and Che Guevara depart from Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, en route to Santiago de Cuba aboard the yacht Granma, with 82 men.
- November 28 – Roger Vadim's film And God Created Woman (Et Dieu... créa la femme), is released in France, making Brigitte Bardot an international sex symbol.[24]
- November 30 – African-American Floyd Patterson wins the world heavyweight boxing championship that is vacant after the retirement of Rocky Marciano.
December
- December 3 – The 1956 Bush Terminal explosion occurs in Brooklyn, United States.
- December 4 – The Million Dollar Quartet (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash) get together at Sun Studio, for the first and last time in history.
- December 9 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810, a Canadair North Star, crashes into Slesse Mountain near Chilliwack, British Columbia. All 62 people aboard, including five Canadian Football League players, are killed.
- December 12 – Japan becomes a member of the United Nations.
- December 19 – British doctor John Bodkin Adams is arrested for the murder of 2 patients in Eastbourne, England; he will be acquitted.
- December 23 – British and French troops leave the Suez Canal region.
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Births and deaths
|Category:1956 births|Deaths in 1956}}
Nobel Prizes
References
Further reading
External links
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