December 29 - Violet MacMillan, American Broadway theatre actress(b. 1887)
Events
January 3 - Frances Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress.
January 7 - President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.
January 13 - Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen as President of Yugoslavia.
January 19 - 68% of all television sets in the United States are tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.
January 31 - A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands.
February 11 - President Dwight Eisenhower refuses clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
February 11 - The Soviet Union breaks off diplomatic relations with Israel.
February 19 - Censorship: Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States.
February 21 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson discover the structure of the DNA molecule.
February 28 - James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April Nature (pub. April 2).
March 1 - Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses. He dies four days later.
March 2 - The Academy Awards are first broadcast on television by NBC.
March 3 - A Canadian Pacific Airlines De Havilland Comet crashes in Karachi, Pakistan killing 11.
March 6 - Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Joseph Stalin as Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
March 18 - An earthquake hits western Turkey, killing 250.
March 26 - Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
April 8 - Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta is convicted by Kenya's British rulers.
April 9 - Warner Brothers premieres the first 3-D film, entitled House of Wax.
April 13 - CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program MKULTRA.
April 16 - Queen Elizabeth II launches the Royal Yacht Britannia.
April 24 - Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
April 25 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.
April 29 - The first U.S. experimental 3D-TV broadcast showed an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV.
May 4 - Ernest Hemingway is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.
May 11 - The 1953 Waco tornado outbreak: An F5 tornado hits downtown Waco, Texas, killing 114.
May 18 - Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier.
May 25 - Nuclear testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its first and only nuclear artillery test.
May 25 - The first public television station in the United States officially begins broadcasting as KUHT from the campus of the University of Houston.
May 29 - Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay are the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay's (adopted) 39th birthday.
June 2 - The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, the first to be televised.
June 8 - Flint-Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A tornado hits Flint, Michigan, and kills 115. This is the last tornado to claim more than 100 lives.
June 8 - The United States Supreme Court rules that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons.
June 9 - Flint-Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: a tornado spawned from the same storm system as the Flint tornado hits in Worcester, Massachusetts killing 94.
June 13 - Hungarian Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi is replaced by Imre Nagy
June 17 - Workers Uprising: in East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
June 18 - The Republic of Egypt is declared and the monarchy is abolished.
June 18 - A United States Air Force C-124 crashes and burns near Tokyo, Japan killing 129.
June 19 - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
June 30 - The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.
July 7 - Che Guevara sets out on a trip through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.
July 20 - The United Nations Economic and Social Council votes to make UNICEF a permanent agency.
July 26 - Fidel Castro leads an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, thus beginning the Cuban Revolution.
July 26 - 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.
July 27 - Korean War ends: The United States, People's Republic of China, and North Korea, sign an armistice agreement. Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea, refuses to sign but pledges to observe the armistice.
July 30 - Rikidōzan holds a ceremony announcing the establishment of the Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance.
August 12 - Nuclear testing: the Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of Joe 4, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon.
August 17 - Addiction: First meeting of Narcotics Anonymous in Southern California.
August 19 - Cold War: the CIA helps to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and reinstate the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
August 20 - The Soviet Union publicly acknowledges that it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
August 28 - Nippon Television broadcasts Japan's first television show, including its first TV advertisement.
September 7 - Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
September 13 - Nikita Khrushchev appointed secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
October 5 - The first documented recovery meeting of Narcotics Anonymous is held.
October 12 - "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" opens at Plymouth Theatre, New York
October 15 - British nuclear test Totem 1 detonated at Emu Field, South Australia.
October 27 - British nuclear test Totem 2 is carried out at Emu Field, South Australia.
October 30 - Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, which states that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.
November 2 - The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan names the country The Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
November 9 - Cambodia becomes independent from France.
November 17 - The remaining human inhabitants of the Blasket Islands, Kerry, Ireland are evacuated to the mainland.
November 21 - Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the "Piltdown Man" skull, held to be one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, was a hoax.
November 30 - Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka (king) of Buganda is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of Uganda.
December 8 - Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the Atoms for Peace speech.
December 9 - Red Scare: General Electric announces that all communist employees will be discharged from the company.
December 24 - Tangiwai disaster: A railway bridge is destroyed by a lahar at Tangiwai, in the Central North Island of New Zealand, sending a fully loaded passenger train into the Whangaehu River, and killing 153 people.
December 30 - The first ever NTSC color television sets go on sale for about USD at $1,175 each from RCA.
