Year One, 1955: Las Vegas 1955

November 3 – The five-and-one-half-mile long
Rimutaka Railroad tunnel opens in New Zealand.
November 5 – Racial segregation is outlawed on
trains and buses in Interstate Commerce in the United States.
November 19 – C. Northcote Parkinson first
propounds 'Parkinson's Law', in The Economist.
November 20 – Bo Diddley makes his television
debut on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town show for the CBS-TV network.
November 26 – The British Governor of Cyprus
declares a State of Emergency on the island.

January

January 2 – José Antonio Remón Cantera,
president of Panama, is assassinated at a race track in Panama City.

January 3 – José Ramón Guizado becomes
president of Panama.

January 7 – Marian Anderson is the first
African American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

January 18–January 20 – Battle of Yijiangshan
Islands: The Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army seizes the islands from
the Republic of China (Taiwan).

January 19 – The game Scrabble debuts.

January 22 – The Pentagon announces a plan to
develop ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) armed with nuclear weapons.

January 23 – Sutton Coldfield rail crash
kills 17 near Birmingham, England.

January 25 – Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
of the Soviet Union announces the end of the war between the USSR and Germany,
which began during World War II in 1941.

January 28 – United States Congress
authorizes President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use force to protect Formosa from the People's Republic of China.

February

February 1 – Ray Kroc opens a McDonald's fast
food restaurant (the company's 9th since it was founded in 1940), but Kroc later takes over the company and oversees its worldwide expansion.

February 4 – Pact of Mutual Cooperation
"Baghdad Pact" signed.

February 10 – Seventh Fleet of the United
States Navy helps the Republic of China evacuate Chinese Nationalist army and
residents from the Tachen Islands to Taiwan.

February 12 – U.S. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower sends the first U.S. advisors to South Vietnam.

February 16 – Nearly 100 die in a fire at a home for the elderly in Yokohama, Japan.

February 19 – Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization established.

February 22 – In Chicago's Democratic primary,
Mayor Martin H. Kennelly loses to the head of the Cook County Democratic Party,
Richard J. Daley, 364,839 to 264,77.

March

March 2 – Claudette Colvin (a fifteen year
old African American girl) refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white woman after the driver demands it. She is carried off the
bus backwards whilst being kicked and handcuffed and harassed on the way to the police station.

March 5 – WBBJ-TV signs on the air in the Jackson, Tennessee, with WDXI as its initial call-letters, to expanded American commercial television in
mostly-rural areas.

March 7 – The Broadway musical version of Peter Pan, which had opened in 1954 starring Mary Martin, is presented on television for the first time by NBC-TV
with its original cast, as an installment of Producers' Showcase. It is also the first time that a stage musical is presented in its entirety on TV almost
exactly as it was performed on stage. This program gains the largest viewership of a TV special up to this time, and it becomes one of the first great TV
family musical classics.

March 17 – The Richard Riot occurs in Montreal.

March 19 – KXTV of Stockton, California, signs on the air in the United States, being the 100th commercial television station in this country.

March 20 – Evan Hunter's movie adaptation of the novel Blackboard Jungle premieres in
the United States, featuring the famous single, Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and His Comets. Teenagers jump from their seats to dance to the song.

April

April 1 – EOKA A starts a revolution British
rule in Cyprus (taken over from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 and a Crown Colony
since 1925).

April 5 Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Richard J. Daley defeats Robert Merrian to
become Mayor of Chicago by a vote of 708,222 to 581,555.

April 6 – Anthony Eden becomes Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom.

April 11 – The Taiwanese Kuomintang put a time-bomb on the airplane Kashmir Princess,
killing 16 but failing to assassinate the People's Republic of China leader, Zhou Enlai.

April 12 – The Salk polio vaccine, having passed large-scale trials earlier in the United States, receives full approval by the FDA.

April 14 – The Detroit Red Wings win the Stanley Cup for the 7th time in franchise history. Detroit wouldn't win the Cup again until 1997.

April 15 – Middle East Treaty Organization (MENTO).

April 16 – Burma-Japanese peace treaty, signed in Rangoon on November 5, 1954, comes
into effect, formally ending a state of war between the two countries that had not existed for a long time.

April 17 – Imre Nagy, the communist Premier of Hungary, is ousted for being too
moderate.

April 18–April 24 – Asian-African Conference held in Indonesia.

May

May 1 – Warsaw Treaty on Friendship,
Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed (Warsaw Treaty Organization) (effective
June 6).

May 5 – West Germany becomes a sovereign country recognized by important Western
foreign countries, such as France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United
States.

May 6 – WEU charter effective.

May 9 – West Germany joins the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

May 10 – Mark David Chapman, the man who, in 1980, shoot and brutally kill former
Beatle John Lennon, is born.

May 11 – Japanese National Railways' ferry Shiun Maru sinks after collision with sister ship Uko Maru in thick fog off Takamatsu, Shikoku, in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan; 166 passengers (many children) and two crew are killed. This event is influential in plans to construct the Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge (built
1986-98).

May 12– New York's Third Avenue Elevated runs its last train between Chathem Square
in Manhattan and East 149th Street in the Bronx, thus ending elevated train service in Manhattan.

May 14 – Eight Communist Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, sign a mutual
defence treaty in Warsaw, Poland, that is called the Warsaw Pact.

May 15 – Austrian State Treaty, which restores Austria's national sovereignty, is
concluded between the four occupying powers following World War II (the United
Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France) and Austria, setting it up as a neutral country.

May 25 – Joe Brown and George Band are the first to attain the summit of Kanchenjunga
in the Himalayas, as part of a British team led by Charles Evans.

July

July 7 – The New Zealand Special Air Service
is formed.

July 13 – Ruth Ellis (born 1926) is hanged for murder in London, becoming the last
woman ever to be executed in the United Kingdom.

July 17 – The American Broadcasting Company broadcasts a sneak preview of Disneyland
in Anaheim, California.

July 18 Disneyland opens to the public in Anaheim, California. The first nuclear-generated electrical power is sold commercially, partially powering the town of Arco, Idaho. The Illinois Governor, William Stratton, signs the "Loyalty Oath Act", passed
by the State Legislature, which mandates all public employees take a loyalty oath to Illinois and the United States, or lose their jobs.
The first Geneva Summit meeting between the United States, the Soviet Union, the
United Kingdom, and France begins. It ends on July 23.

July 27 – El Al Flight 402 from Vienna,
Austria to Tel Aviv-Yafo via Istanbul is shot down over Bulgaria. All 58 passengers and crewmen aboard the Lockheed Constellation airplane are killed.

July 28 – The first Interlingua Congress in Tours, France, leading to foundation of the Union Mundial pro Interlingua.

August

August 19: Hurricane Diane August 19 –
Hurricane Diane hits the northeastern United States, killing over 200 people,
and causing over $1.0 billion in damage.

August 20 – Hundreds of people are killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and
Algeria.

August 22 – Eleven schoolchildren are killed when their school bus is hit by a freight train in Spring City, Tennessee.

August 25 – The last Soviet Army occupation forces leave Austria.

August 27 – First edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published, in London.

September

September 30: James Dean dies in a car wreck.
September 2 – Under the guidance of Dr Humphry Osmond, Christopher Mayhew ingests 400 mg of mescaline hydrochloride and allows himself to be filmed as part of a Panorama special for BBC TV that was never broadcast.

September 6 – Istanbul Pogrom: Istanbul's
Greek minority is the target of a government-sponsored pogrom.

September 10 – The long-running program
Gunsmoke debuts on the CBS-TV network.
September 14 – Pope Pius XII elevates many of
the Apostolic Vicariates in Africa to Metropolitan Archdioceses

September 15 – Vladimir Nabokov's
controversial novel Lolita is published in Paris by Olympia Press.

September 19–September 21 – The President of
Argentina, Juan Peron, is ousted in a military coup.
September 19 – Hurricane Hilda kills about 200
people in Mexico.

September 22 – Independent Commercial
Television (ITV) begins broadcasting in the United Kingdom.

September 23 – Alec Guinness meets the actor
James Dean. Guinness supposedly has a premonition of Dean's death.

September 24 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, President
of the United States suffers a coronary thrombosis while on vacation in Denver,
Colorado.

September 30 – Actor James Dean is killed when
his automobile collides with another car at a highway junction near Cholame, California. Dean is just 24 years old.

October

October 2 – Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV
program debuts on the NBC-TV network in the United States.

October 3 – The Mickey Mouse Club TV program
debuts on the ABC-TV network in the United States.

October 4 The Reverend Sun Myung Moon is
released from prison in Seoul, South Korea.
The Brooklyn Dodgers finally win the World Series, defeating the New York Yankees 2–0 in Game 7 of the 1955 baseball playoff.

October 5 – Disneyland Hotel opens to the
public in Anaheim, California.

October 11 – 70-mm film for projection is
introduced with the theatrical release of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical film, Oklahoma!

October 14 – ODECA secretariat inaugurated.

October 20 The first footage of Elvis Presley
is filmed as part of a film short about the Cleveland, Ohio, disc jockey Bill Randle.
Cardiff is announced as the capital city of
the principality of Wales, within the United Kingdom.

October 26 After the last Allied troops have
left the country and following the provisions of the Austrian Independence Treaty, Austria declares its permanent neutrality.

Ngo Dinh Diem proclaims Vietnam to be a republic with himself as its President and forms the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

October 29 – Soviet battleship Novorossiysk
explodes at moorings in Sevastopol Bay, killing 608, the Soviet Union's worst naval disaster.

October 26: Austria free. November 1 – The
Vietnam War begins between the South Vietnam Army and the North Vietnam Army in
which the latter is allied with the Viet Cong. A time bomb explodes in the
cargo hold of United Airlines Flight 629, a Douglas DC-6B airliner flying above
Longmont, Colorado, killing all 39 passengers and 5 crew members on board.

November

December

December 14: Tappan Zee Bridge opens.

December 5 The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial

Organizations merge to become the AFL-CIO.

The Montgomery Improvement Association is formed in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black ministers to coordinate a Black
people's boycott of all city buses.

December 9 – Adnan Menderes of DP forms the
new government of Turkey (22nd government)

December 14 The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York
opens to traffic.

Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Finland,
Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sri Lanka join the United Nations simultaneously, after several years of
moratorium on admitting new members that began during the Korean War.

December 22 – American cytogeneticist Joe Hin
Tjio discovers the correct number of human chromosomes, forty-six.

December 31 – General Motors Corporation
becomes the first American corporation to make a profit of over one billion dollars in one year.

Strömsund Bridge in Sweden is completed,
being the first significant cable-stayed bridge of the modern era