President:
Pres: Harry S. Truman
Pres: Dwight D. Eisenhower elected over Adlai Stevenson
General
- Culture: American Eugenics Society combines with Population Council under Rockefeller family
- Entertainment: Liberace starts popular television show
Leonard Nimoy appears as Martian on science fiction tv show Zombies of the Stratosphere
TV's magazine format "Today" show debuts
Jackie Gleason Show (The Honeymooners), "Dragnet", and two Arthur Godfrey shows
Popular artists include Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney, Frankie Lane
- Medicine: Polio outbreak in US – 3300 die and 57000 cases worldwide
- Military: Announcement of hydrogen bomb experiments
Harold Blauer – depression patient – injected with mescaline by US Army and was killed by final dose
Pentagon psychic projects underway
- Politics: Elder Ezra Taft Benson chosen as Secretary of Agriculture
Kennedy elected U.S. Senator
- Sports: Women banned from playing professional baseball
Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight boxing champion
East
- New York: Lever House designed by Skidmore Owings and Merril
Midwest
- General: Drought
- Ohio: Prisoners at Ohio State Prison injected with cancer cells
South
- General: First year without reported racial lynchings in US
31 tornadoes reported
West and Pacific
- Alaska: Kamchatka quake in Aleutians estimated at a 9
- California: 7.3 quake kills twelve
Bullock discovers rattlesnakes possess third eye – heat sensing
- Utah: Military scientists spread Brucella around Dugway