1939: Hedda Hopper's Hollywood debuts on radio
1940: Coventry attacked by 500 Luftwaffe bombers
1941: HMS Ark Royal is torpedoed
1942: Casablanca premieres at the Hollywood Theater in New York
1943: Roosevelt, Churchill & Chiang Kai-shek meet at Cairo in Egypt to discuss ways to defeat Japan
1944: 32 Lancaster bombers finally sink German battleship Tirpitz
1945: The Nuremberg Trials begin at the Palace of Justice
1946: U.N.E.S.C.O. a specialized agency of the U.N. is formed
1947: Hughes H-4 Hercules ('Spruce Goose') makes first & only flight
1948: Takahe, thought to be extinct rediscovered in New Zealand
1949: Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse & Narayan Apte are executed
1950: Harry Hay helps found the 'Mattachine Society', one of the first gay-liberation organizations
1951: 'Gigi' opens on Broadway starring Audrey Hepburn
1952: The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie opens in West End of London
1953: British Natural History Museum announce Piltdown Man is a hoax
1954: Godzilla directed by Ishiro Honda, premieres in Tokyo, the first Japanese Kaiju film
1955: Johnny Cash, 'The Man in Black', makes his 1st chart appearance with 'Cry Cry Cry'
1956: Aged 21, Floyd Patterson becomes youngest undisputed World Heavyweight Boxing Champion
1957: Soviet Union launch Sputnik 2, on board is a dog named Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth
1958: Missile, part of the Atlas program, becomes first InterContinental Ballistic Missile to fly full range
1959: MGM releases Ben-Hur starring Charlton Heston. The movie will win 11 Academy Awards
1960: Another Polaris missile is test-launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida
1961: United Nations General Assembly unanimously elects U Thant to position of acting Secretary-General
1962: Britain & France sign agreement to develop the iconic Concorde supersonic airliner
1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas