Late 1950s facts

While investigating facts about Late 1950s, I found out little known, but curios details like:

In the late 1950s, China's government began a campaign to kill millions of sparrows because they ate crops. As a result, there was a huge increase in crop-eating insects, which led to a severe famine.

In an effort to one-up the Soviets during the late 1950s, the United States planned to hit the moon with a nuclear warhead-tipped ICBM. In the Air Force's infinite wisdom, however, the plan was scrapped because they felt the public would respond unfavorably to nuking the moon.

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 40 of the best facts about Late 1950s I managed to collect.

1. Most of the modern global poultry industry relies on a single breed of chicken from a farm in Connecticut that won the national "Chicken of Tomorrow" competition in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

2. As late as the 1950s, Doctors were endorsing tobacco manufactures, even claiming that they had positive health benefits, such as "removing dangerous irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing".

3. Cary Grant began experimenting with LSD in the late 1950s, using it in psychotherapy sessions. He had an estimated 100 sessions over several years

4. Popcorn ceiling which was popular from the late 1950s to the 1980s was the standard for bedroom and residential hallway ceilings for its bright, white appearance, noise reduction qualities and ability to hide imperfections.

5. No where was the Marshall Plan's effects more evident than in Germany. After Germany was partitioned into West and East and after Stalin refused to allow the new communist regimes of eastern Europe to participate in the Marshall Plan, the two Germanys developed quite differently. Thanks in part to the Marshall Plan, West Germany's economy was booming by the late 1950s while large parts of East Germany still looked like the war had just ended.

6. In the late 1950s Andy Warhol began to focus on painting and started to create pop art. This form of art focused on images of commercial goods.

7. There was a drug called Thalidomide used in the late 1950s and early 1960s to combat morning sickness, but led to children being born without limbs.

8. Friedan began research on her opus magnum, The Feminine Mystique, in the late 1950s and published the book in 1963.

9. Although Yugoslavia became a communist country after World War II, it quickly broke with the Soviet Union. It received American aid in the late 1940s and early 1950s, although the aid was not part of the Marshall Plan.

10. Although the Marshall Plan involved the United States giving direct financial aid to western Europe, it helped to increase American exports. American steel factories boomed in the late 1940s and early 1950s as they exported parts and finished goods to Europe.

What is true about late 1950s?

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The earliest known case of infection with HIV-1 in a human was detected in a blood sample collected in 1959. Genetic analysis of this blood sample suggested that HIV-1 may have stemmed from a single virus in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Hunkerin' is the name applied to the American fad of resting in the squatting position in the late 1950s. Life referred to it as "sociable squatting". - source

The habit of police officers going to donut shops began in the 1950s when they would go to donut shops to do their paperwork late at night. Donut shops were often the only businesses open at that hour and the owners were happy to have police presence so late at night.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Randolph worked with Martin Luther King Junior to protest segregation in schools.

During the "Red Scare" in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, activists on the far right of American politics routinely asserted that fluoridation was part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime. - source

Evers helped organize protests of segregated beaches on Mississippi's gulf coast during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"Poutine" is a Quebec thing since the late 1950s.

From the late 1950s through the end of 1997, the Soviet Union, and later Russia, built a total of 245 nuclear submarines, more than all other nations combined. Today, six countries deploy some form of nuclear-powered submarine.

Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Telephone numbers used to start with two letters with accompanying mnemonic words to identify the telephone exchange until the late 1950s, telephone companies started moving towards all-number dialing

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than 10,000 children in 46 countries were born with deformities such as phocomelia as a consequence of thalidomide use, wich lead to a huge medical scandal.