America in the 1950's

The 1950's in America started with Harry.S. Truman as president. It was a decade that saw many changes in America not least with in the arts movement. Maybe the changes retrospectively seem more subtle than those of the sixties and subsequent decades but the fifties paved the way for modern life as we know it and especially contemporary art as we know it. Here are a wide range of events that happened in this decade.
1950 - Korean War begins.
1951 - The first live transcontinental television broadcast takes place in San Francisco, California from the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference. One month later, the situation comedy I Love Lucy premieres on CBS, sparking the rise of television in the American home and the Golden Age of Television
1953 - Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated as President
1954 - The Tournament of Roses Parade becomes the first event televised nationally in color
1955 - Ray Kroc opens a McDonald's fast food restaurant and, after purchasing the franchise from its original owners, oversees its national (and later, worldwide) expansion
1955 - Warsaw Pact, which establishes a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe (including the USSR
1955 - Disneyland opens at Anaheim, California
1955 - Rock and roll music enters the mainstream, with "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets becoming the first record to top the Billboard magazine pop charts. Elvis Presley also begins his rise to fame around this same time
1956 - Jackson Pollock dies in a car crash in Springs, New York
1957 - Soviets launch Sputnik; "space race" begins
1959 - Cuban Revolution
1959 - Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th U.S. states; to date, they are the final two states admitted to the union

[Facts accessed on 5/4/12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_history_(1950%E2%80%931969)]