What Happened in 1953 — Events, Births & Deaths

Frances P. Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress.

The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett receives its première in Paris.

An article appears in Pravda accusing some of the most prestigious and prominent doctors, mostly Jews, in the Soviet Union of taking part in a vast plot to poison members of the top Soviet political and military leadership.

Josip Broz Tito is elected the first President of Yugoslavia.

Almost 72 percent of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.

A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom.

The Batepá massacre occurs in São Tomé when the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners unleash a wave of violence against the native creoles known as forros.

Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower denies all appeals for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Israeli-Soviet relations are severed.

Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later.

A De Havilland Comet (Canadian Pacific Air Lines) crashes in Karachi, Pakistan, killing 11 people.

Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, dies at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage four days earlier.

An earthquake hits western Turkey, killing at least 1,070 people.

CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program Project MKUltra.

Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Francis Crick and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" describing the double helix structure of DNA.

Operation Moolah offers $50,000 to any pilot who defects with a fully mission-capable Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 to South Korea. The first pilot was to receive $100,000.

The first U.S. experimental 3D television broadcast shows an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV.

Two men are rescued from a semitrailer that crashed over the side of the Pit River Bridge before it fell into the Sacramento River. Amateur photographer Virginia Schau photographs "Rescue on Pit River Bridge", the first and only winning submission for the Pulitzer Prize for Photography to have been taken by a woman.

Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.

In the deadliest of a series of tornadoes, an F5 tornado kills 114 in Waco, Texas.

Approximately 7,100 brewery workers in Milwaukee perform a walkout, marking the start of the 1953 Milwaukee brewery strike.

Delta Air Lines Flight 318 crashes near Marshall, Texas, killing 19.

Jacqueline Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier.

Nuclear weapons testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only nuclear artillery test.

The first public television station in the United States officially begins broadcasting as KUHT from the campus of the University of Houston.

Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay's (adopted) 39th birthday.

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey becomes the first British coronation, and one of the first major international events, to be televised.

An F5 tornado hits Beecher, Michigan, United States, killing 116, injuring 844, and destroying 340 homes.

The United States Supreme Court rules in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. that restaurants in Washington, D.C., cannot refuse to serve black patrons.

The Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence kills 94 people in Massachusetts.

Cold War: East Germany Workers Uprising: In East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.

The Egyptian revolution of 1952 ends with the overthrow of the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the declaration of the Republic of Egypt.

A United States Air Force C-124 crashes and burns near Tachikawa, Japan, killing 129.

Cold War: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.

Lavrentiy Beria, head of MVD, is arrested by Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the Politburo.

The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara sets out on a trip through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The largest number of United States midshipman casualties in a single event results from an aircraft crash in Florida, killing 44.

Cold War: Fidel Castro leads an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, thus beginning the Cuban Revolution. The movement took the name of the date: 26th of July Movement

Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle orders an anti-polygamy law enforcement crackdown on residents of Short Creek, Arizona, which becomes known as the Short Creek raid.

Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment repel a number of Chinese assaults against a key position known as The Hook during the Battle of the Samichon River, just hours before the Armistice Agreement is signed, ending the Korean War.

Korean War: Cessation of hostilities is achieved when the United States, China, and North Korea sign an armistice agreement. Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, refuses to sign but pledges to observe the armistice.

First Indochina War: The French Union withdraws its forces from Operation Camargue against the Viet Minh in central Vietnam.

Thermonuclear bomb testing: The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of "RDS-6s" (Joe 4) using a "layered" scheme.

The 7.2 Ms Ionian earthquake shakes the southern Ionian Islands with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). Between 445 and 800 people are killed.

First meeting of Narcotics Anonymous takes place, in Southern California.

Cold War: The CIA and MI6 help to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and reinstate the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The penal colony on Devil's Island is permanently closed.

Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

U.S. Senator and future President John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.

Nikita Khrushchev is appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

American Airlines Flight 723 crashes in Colonie, New York, killing 28 people.

Lieutenant No Kum-sok, a North Korean pilot, defects to South Korea with his jet fighter.

The Four Level Interchange, first stack interchange in the world opened in Los Angeles.

Rationing of sugar in the United Kingdom ends.

Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro delivers his "History Will Absolve Me" speech, and is sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment by the Fulgencio Batista government for leading an attack on the Moncada Barracks.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is published.

BCPA Flight 304, a DC-6, crashes near San Francisco.

President Eisenhower approves the top-secret document NSC 162/2 concerning the maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent force against the Soviet Union.

Cambodia gains independence from France.

The remaining human inhabitants of the Blasket Islands, County Kerry, Ireland, are evacuated to the mainland.

Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka (king) of Buganda is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of Uganda.

U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his "Atoms for Peace" speech, which leads to an American program to supply equipment and information on nuclear power to schools, hospitals, and research institutions around the world.

Red Scare: General Electric announces that all communist employees will be discharged from the company.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tangiwai disaster: In New Zealand's North Island, at Tangiwai, a railway bridge is damaged by a lahar and collapses beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.