1945 – United Nations founded. The United Nations charter was drafted at a conference of fifty nations on April 25 in San Francisco. The organization would include a General Assembly, in which every nation would be represented, and a Security Council, with permanent representatives of five powers (United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China).

Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie opens on Broadway.

1946 – Atomic Energy Commission established to oversee all nuclear research, civilian and military.

1947 – The Truman Doctrine provides aid to Greece and Turkey. Without American military and economic aid, Truman warned that these two countries would fall to the communists.

Marshall Plan approved. Secretary of State George C. Marshall recommended massive aid be committed to rebuild European countries and economies devastated by World War II. It was expected that the plan would eventually provide trade partners for America and help to stop the spread of communism.

The National Security Act passed. This act created the Department of Defense to oversee all branches of the armed services, a National Security Council (NSC) to govern foreign and military policy, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather information through open and covert methods.

The Taft-Hartley Act or the Labor-Management Relations Act passed. Considered pro-labor, this act outlawed closed shops (a place where you had to be in the union first before being hired), and empowered the president to call for a ninety-day "cooling-off" period by issuing an injunction against any strike that threatened national safety or health. Truman vetoed the bill, but both houses easily overrode his veto.

Truman's Committee on Civil Rights issues To Secure These Rights. The committee found that African Americans were routinely denied employment opportunities, equal education, voting rights and decent housing. White citizens in rural Georgia lynched several black veterans who ignored threats and voted. Truman recommended that Congress implement his committee's suggestions, but Southern senators threatened to filibuster. In 1948, by executive order, Truman ended segregation in the armed forces.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigates Hollywood for communist influences and sympathizers. Despite its probing, no evidence of a Hollywood conspiracy could be uncovered. However, many lives and careers were shattered by subsequent blacklisting that prevented supposed communists and leftists from finding work.

Levittown (Long Island) construction begins. William Levitt, the most famous suburban developer, constructed large housing developments using mass-production techniques that made suburban homes affordable for millions.

1948 – In May, Israel proclaims independence, which Truman recognizes the next day. However, Palestinian Arabs, upset about being displaced from what they considered their homeland, fought against Israel in the same year, marking the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.

Truman elected president. With a divided Democratic Party, the Republicans and political pundits were confident that New York governor Thomas Dewey would win election. Some odds makers favored Dewey by as much as 20 to 1, and on the night of the election the conservative Chicago Tribune prematurely printed its headline proclaiming Dewey's victory. But Truman, a staunch campaigner, won the election with 50 percent of the popular vote and 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 46 percent and 189 electoral votes.

Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking member of the State Department, is accused of passing classified documents to the Soviets in 1937, convicted of perjury and sentenced to several years in prison. Hiss maintained his innocence and the evidence against him remains inconclusive.

T. S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

Ezra Pound publishes The Pisan Cantos.

The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic-bomb, the news of which frightens Americans.

As a result, Truman approved the development of a new hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon that would be far more powerful than the bombs the United States had used in 1945.

China falls to the communists. Mao Zedong drove the Nationalist and American-backed government of Chiang Kai-shek out of power and on to the offshore island of Formosa (now Taiwan). The State Department was hardly surprised as it had long been aware of the corruption and inefficiency of Chiang's government.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman opens on Broadway.

William Faulkner wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

1950 – The National Security Council's report (commonly known as NCS-68) stated that the United States must lead the free world against the threat of communism. The report recommended that America must move to stop the spread of communism wherever it occurs, and called for a major expansion of American military power, with a defense budget four times the previously projected figure. Many Democrats and Republicans resisted the recommendations as they would necessitate a hefty increase in taxes. All debate was silenced, however, by the advent of the Korean War.

The McCarran Internal Security Act requires all Communists to register with the Attorney General. First-term senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy fueled the anticommunist fervor. In February in Wheeling, West Virginia, he held up a list of 205 known communists currently working in the State Department. McCarthy soon emerged as the nation's foremost leader against domestic subversion.

1952 – The United States ends its occupation of Japan. The United States was confident that Japan was well on its way to revitalization and would serve as a buffer against Asian communism.

1953 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed. In 1951, the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets and sentenced to death. Despite appeals and protests, Eisenhower refused to commute their death sentence to life imprisonment.

1954 – Army-McCarthy hearings. In January, Senator Joseph McCarthy began to attack Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and the armed forces in general. His charges seemed so outrageous that Congress organized a special investigation, which became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings. The televised hearings were devastating to McCarthy, who bullied witnesses, made reckless accusations, evaded questions, and, overall, seemed foolish and contemptuous. As a result, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him for "conduct unbecoming a senator." Three years later, with little public support and respect, he died.

Eisenhower signs the St. Lawrence Seaway Act. Under this act, the United States and Canada combined in an ambitious engineering project to open the Great Lakes to ocean shipping.

Eisenhower orders the CIA to help overthrow the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala.

Ernest Hemingway wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

1955 – Montgomery bus boycott. On December 1, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama when she refused to yield her seat to a white passenger (as required by Jim Crow laws). The arrest of Parks, who was a community civil rights activist, enraged the city's African-Americans. They organized an extremely successful bus boycott to demand an end to segregated seating. The bus company, which was private, began to lose money as did the downtown stores. In late 1956, inspired in part by the boycott in Montgomery, the Supreme Court declared segregation in public transportation to be illegal. The buses in Montgomery abandoned their policy of discriminatory seating and the boycott ended.

Elvis Presley electrifies his audiences with his powerful voice and conscious immitation of black song styling, his physical gyrations, and his rebellious appearance.

1956 – The Federal Highway Act authorizes $25 billion for a ten-year program to construct over 40,000 miles of interstate highways.

President Eisenhower was reelected in a landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson.

Suez Canal crisis. After the United States withdrew offers to help Egypt build the Aswan Dam across the Nile, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal from the British, and stated that he would use the income from the canal to build the dam. Israel, Great Britain, and France attacked Egypt to regain control of the canal. Fearful of a world war, Eisenhower refused to support the invasion and joined the Soviet Union in the United Nations denouncing the attack. The United States helped to pressure the French and British troops into withdrawing and persuaded Israel to agree to a truce.

Allen Ginsberg publishes Howl.

1957 – The Soviet Union stuns the United States by launching Sputnik, the first satellite, into outer space. In response, the United States government funded improved science education programs, created more research laboratories, and increased its own efforts in exploring outer space.

The so-called "baby boom" peaks. The nation's population increased by 20 percent in the 1950s, from 150 million to 179 million.

Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road.

1958 – Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier, demands that Western forces withdraw from West Berlin. The Soviet leader went on to say that Western powers could negotiate further access to Berlin with the East Germany government. Eisenhower rejected the ultimatum and Khrushchev backed down.

1959 – Fidel Castro, a lawyer, leads a rebellion of impoverished peasants to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista had close ties to the United States government and to organized-crime figures who operated the island's gambling, prostitution, and drug rings. After a visit to America where Castro and Eisenhower had a cool meeting, Castro returned home and filled key government positions with communists and confiscated American-owned properties. Eisenhower placed an embargo on Cuban products and mobilized opposition to him in Latin America. Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid.

Khrushchev visits the United States at Eisenhower's invitation. Eisenhower spent the final eighteen months of his presidency trying to improve Soviet-United States relations. Although Khrushchev's visit produced no significant results, it did ease tensions, even if only briefly.

Robert Lowell publishes Life Studies.

1960 – Russians shoot down a high-altitude U-2 American spy plane over Soviet territory. The incident ended any of Eisenhower's hopes that his personal diplomacy could thaw the cold war. Khrushchev canceled a summit meeting scheduled with the president in Paris and withdrew his invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union.

John F. Kennedy elected president. Kennedy narrowly defeated Vice President Richard Nixon: 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent in the popular vote, and 303 to 219 in the electoral vote.

1961 – Eisenhower's farewell address warns that too much emphasis on new weapons systems could lead to an "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought" by the "military-industrial complex" at the expense of democratic institutions.

Kennedy expands U.S. role in Vietnam. Kennedy accepted Eisenhower's "domino theory": if the pro-Western government of South Vietnam fell to the communists, other nations in Southeast Asia would fall one after the other. By Kennedy's assassination, 16,000 American "advisors" were stationed in Vietnam.

Bay of Pigs disaster. President Kennedy approved an attack of Cuba by an army of approximately 2,000 Cuban exiles. Poorly equipped and inadequately trained, the army landed in the swampy Bay of Pigs, expecting American air support and an uprising of Cuban citizens. Neither materialized. Kennedy withdrew the air support at the last minute, fearful of involving America too overtly. Within two days Castro's army had captured the invaders. Kennedy was humiliated by the affair for which he took full responsibility.

The Soviets erect the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of dissatisfied East Germans into the city's free western zone. Despite American protests, the wall stayed up and remained heavily guarded.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins "freedom rides." An interracial group of students traveling by bus through the South tried to force the desegregation of bus stations. They met with violence so frequently that President Kennedy dispatched federal marshalls to ensure the peace and then ordered the integration of all bus and train stations.

Peace Core established. This program sent young men and women volunteers to third world countries to provide technical, educational, and public health services.

On May 5, Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space. Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin had preceded him by several months.

1962 – Cuban missile crisis. Although Khrushchev promised that the Soviets had no intention of placing offensive weapons in Cuba, a CIA flight over the island confirmed that offensive missile sites were being constructed. Using ships and aircraft, Kennedy announced that he would block "all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba." Tensions mounted as Soviet ships approached the line of American ships, but then the Soviet ships stopped and reversed course. Kennedy received a telegram from Khrushchev agreeing to remove the missiles if the United States agreed not to attack Cuba. While Kennedy was thinking this over, he received a second message from Khrushchev insisting that the United States dismantle the missile bases in Turkey, which bordered on the Soviet Union. Kennedy ignored the second message and accepted the conditions of the first. The president's popularity soared.

John Glenn, later a United States senator from Ohio, becomes the first American to orbit the globe. A Soviet astronaut accomplished the feat first however.

James Meredith desegregates the University of Mississippi. When Governor Ross Barnett personally blocked Meredith from registering, President Kennedy responded by ordering several hundred federal marshalls to escort Meredith to his dormitory. When the marshalls were met by violence, the president sent in federal troops. Two people were killed and 375 were wounded before the violence stopped.

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens on Broadway.

John Steinbeck wins the Nobel Prize for literature.

1963 – The United States and Soviet Union negotiated a nuclear test ban outlawing all above-ground nuclear tests.

University of Alabama desegregation crisis. Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway of a building at the University of Alabama to prevent the court-ordered enrollment of black students. Only after the arrival of federal marshalls did he step aside. That night NAACP official Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.

In August, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched on the Mall in Washington, D.C. for the largest civil rights protest in the nation's history. Before the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam assassinated in a coup. Over the next three years, a series of new and unstable governments added to American's difficulties in Vietnam.

Kennedy assassinated. Since so many Southerners had grown dissatisfied with Kennedy because of his civil rights stand, the president traveled to Dallas, Texas in an effort to regain some Southern support. As his car proceeded in a motorcade to an enthusiastic crowd, he was assassinated by shots from a sniper's rifle. His assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was apprehended, but killed by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, before he had an opportunity to explain his actions and motives. Lyndon Baines Johnson became president.

Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique. Although a renewed women's liberation movement was already underway, Friedan's book is often cited as the first event in the contemporary women's movement. Previous to publication, President Kennedy had established the President's Commission on the Status of Women, which studied issues of discrimination. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 outlawed the pervasive practice of paying women less than men for equal work.