United States Historical Changes from 1950 to the Present

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Over the last 100 years, the United States and human history have gone through tremendous changes. Empires that are centuries old have crumbled as new ideologies have emerged from breakthroughs in medicine and science, in civil rights and technology. Discussed in this text are 18 of the most significant events that took place between 1952 and 2018.

1952 marked the year when the first hydrogen bomb was tested. It was a second-generation thermonuclear device and was among Operation Ivy which took place on the Marshall Islands. The 1954 Brown Vs, Board of Education case took place where the Supreme Court ruled that the segregated school system was unconstitutional. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine were the first African American students to attend high school under the protection of President Dwight Eisenhower. On January 31st, 1958, United States launched the first satellite, Explorer 1 into space. In 1961, East Germany built a 27-mile wall that extended through Berlin dividing friends and families for the next 28 years. In 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a sharpshooter in his motorcade in Dallas as he prepared his re-election bid. In 1963, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin blast off into space and after three days of travel, they landed on the moon’s surface (Brandt, 2020). 1977 marked the rise of the personal home computer which had begun to resemble the modern versions. In 1981, the United States was impacted by HIV/AIDS and the disease spread so fast that by 1986, the death toll was at 5,000. In 1983, the internet we know today was born; it began as a series of endless websites hosted on servers located across the world. In 1985, Soviet Union’s Gorbachev Reagan met with his counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1993, the European Union became a reality after the Maastricht Treaty went into effect. In 1994, Amazon was born in Seattle beginning with the initial aim of being a book store and with a couple of angel investors.

In 2004, Facebook was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts after Mark Zuckerberg a 23-year old student at Harvard University creates ‘the Facebook’ a social networking website (Turaev, 2020). In 2005, hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans destroying the city and creating a humanitarian crisis that lasted weeks. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the president of the United States in what was named as the second-most commonly named event. In 2015, the United States Supreme court made the decision to legalize gay marriages nationwide. In 2011, Osama bin Laden is killed in Pakistan following a 40-minuted firefight with 25 U.S Navy seals which took place in the night.

References

Brandt, A. M. (2020). No magic bullet: a social history of venereal disease in the United States since 1880. Oxford University Press, USA.

Turaev, A. (2020). The Impact of Changes in Public Administration on the Development of Neoconservative Ideas in the United States. Архив Научных Публикаций JSPI.