West Side Story Analysis
Events
- Korean War (1950–1953) – The war, which lasted from June 25, 1950, until the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, started as a civil war between North Korea and the Republic of Korea (South Korea).
- First Indochina War (1946–1954).
- The Vietnam War began in 1955.
- Suez Crisis (1956) – The Suez Crisis was a war fought on Egyptian territory in 1956. Following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the United Kingdom, France and Israel subsequently invaded.
- Algerian War (1954–1962) – An important decolonization war, it was a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare, maquis fighting, terrorism against civilians, use of torture on both sides and counter-terrorism operations by the French Army. The war eventually led to the independence of Algeria from France.
- Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) – The 1959 overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and other forces resulted in the creation of the first communist government in the Western hemisphere.
- Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – A massive, spontaneous popular uprising in the Soviet satellite state of Hungary against that country’s Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist regime, inspired by political changes in Poland and the Soviet Union.
- European Common Market – The European Communities (or Common Markets), the precursor of the European Union, was established with the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
- With the help of the Marshall Plan, post-war reconstruction succeeded, with some countries (including West Germany) adopting free market capitalism while others adopted Keynesian-policy welfare states. Europe continued to be divided into Western and Soviet bloc countries. The geographical point of this division came to be called the Iron Curtain.
- On January 31, 1953, the North Sea flood of 1953 killed 1,835 people in the southwestern Netherlands (especially Zeeland) and 307 in the United Kingdom
- On January 18, 1951, Mount Lamington erupted in Papua New Guinea, killing 3,000 people.
- Typhoon Vera hit central Honshū on September 26, 1959, killing an estimated 5,098, injuring another 38,921, and leaving 1,533,000 homeless.
Technology
- The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth on October 4, 1957.
- The United States conducts its first hydrogen bomb explosion test.
- The invention of the modern Solar cell.
- The first Passenger jets enter service.
- The U.S. uses Federal prisons, mental institutions and pharmacological testing volunteers to test drugs like LSD and chlorpromazine. Also started experimenting with the transorbital lobotomy.
- Luna 2 touched down on the surface of the Moon, making it the first spacecraft to land on lunar surface, and the first to make contact with another celestial body on September 13, 1959.
Science
- 1950 – an immunization vaccine is produced for polio.
- 1951 – the first human cervical cancer cells were cultured outside a body, from Henrietta Lacks. The cells are known as HeLa cells and are the first and most commonly used immortalised cell line.
- 1952 – Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double-helix structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of the double-helix structure.
- 1952 – the Apgar score, a scale for newborn viability, is invented by Virginia Apgar.
- 1953 – the first transistor computer is built at the University of Manchester
- 1954 – the world’s first nuclear power plant is opened in Obninsk near Moscow.
- 1956 – one of the first forms of correction fluid is invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, the founder of the Liquid Paper company
- 1957 – the Immunosuppressive drug Azathioprine, used in rheumatoid arthritis, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and in kidney transplants to prevent rejection, is first synthesized by Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings.[17]
- The first successful ultrasound test of the heart activity.
- NASA is organized.
Music
- Motown Records is founded, with their first hit being Barrett Strong‘s “Money (That’s What I Want)“.
- The musical The Sound of Music first performed
- 1958 There is a Bossa Nova fever
- 1957 West Side Story first performed
- 1956 The first Eurovision Song Contest is held on 24 May
- 1956 The operetta Candide first performed
- 1954 First Fender Stratocaster produced
- On 3 February 1959, a chartered plane transporting the three American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson goes down in foggy conditions near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all four occupants on board, including pilot Roger Peterson. The tragedy is later termed “The Day the Music Died“
Popular music in the early 1950s was essentially a continuation of the crooner sound of the previous decade, with less emphasis on the jazz-influenced big band style and more emphasis on a conservative, operatic, symphonic style of music. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Patti Page, Judy Garland, Johnnie Ray, Kay Starr, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Dean Martin, Georgia Gibbs, Eddie Fisher, Teresa Brewer, Dinah Shore, Kitty Kallen, Joni James, Peggy Lee, Julie London, Toni Arden, June Valli, Doris Day, Arthur Godfrey, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Guy Mitchell, Nat King Cole, and vocal groups like the Mills Brothers, The Ink Spots, The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Chordettes, The Fontane Sisters, The Hilltoppers and the Ames Brothers. Jo Stafford‘s “You Belong To Me” was the #1 song of 1952 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.
The middle of the decade saw a change in the popular music landscape as classic pop was swept off the charts by rock-and-roll. Crooners such as Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and Patti Page, who had dominated the first half of the decade, found their access to the pop charts significantly curtailed by the decade’s end.[18] Doo-wop entered the pop charts in the 1950s. Its popularity soon spawns the parody “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)“.
Rock-n-roll emerged in the mid-1950s with Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Bobby Darin, Ritchie Valens, Duane Eddy, Eddie Cochran, Brenda Lee, Bobby Vee, Connie Francis, Neil Sedaka, Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard being notable exponents. In the mid-1950s, Elvis Presley became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll with a series of network television appearances and chart-topping records. Chuck Berry, with “Maybellene” (1955), “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “Rock and Roll Music” (1957) and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), refined and developed the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, focusing on teen life and introducing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.
Jazz stars in the 1950s who came into prominence in their genres called bebop, hard bop, cool jazz and the blues, at this time included Lester Young, Ben Webster, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Gil Evans, Jerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Art Blakey, Max Roach, the Miles Davis Quintet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday.
Literature
- 1950 in literature –
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles;
Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano;
C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe;
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot;
Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced and Three Blind Mice and Other Stories; Mervyn Peake‘s Gormenghast; Pablo Neruda‘s Canto General.
Death of George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw - 1951 in literature –
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye;
Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair;
Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian; John Cowper Powys‘s Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages;
Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Malone Dies;
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation;
Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad and The Under Dog and Other Stories; Kalki Krishnamurty‘s Ponniyin Selvan.
Death of Sinclair Lewis, André Gide - 1952 in literature –
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea;
E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web;
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man;
Mary Norton’s The Borrowers;
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood;
Agatha Christie’s Mrs McGinty’s Dead, They Do It with Mirrors, The Mousetrap and A Daughter’s a Daughter.
Death of Knut Hamsun - 1953 in literature –
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and The Unnamable;
Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (First James Bond novel);
Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March;
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451;
L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between; George Lamming‘s In the Castle of My Skin;
Leon Uris’s Battle Cry;
Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible first performed;
J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories;
Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye.
Death of Hilaire Belloc, Dylan Thomas, Eugene O’Neill - 1954 in literature –
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings;
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies;
Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception;
Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim;
Christy Brown’s My Left Foot;
William Soutar’s Diaries of a Dying Man;
Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour tristesse;
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!;
Winston Churchill’s The Second World War – completed;
Agatha Christie’s Destination Unknown.
Death of Colette - 1955 in literature –
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo;
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita;
Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof;
Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona;
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley;
Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find;
Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge;
Alistair MacLean’s HMS Ulysses;
Agatha Christie’s Hickory Dickory Dock.
Death of Thomas Mann, Dale Carnegie - 1956 in literature –
Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place;
Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit;
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night;
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems;
Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller;
Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly and The Burden.
Death of H. L. Mencken, Walter de la Mare - 1957 in literature –
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road;
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged;
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin;
Patrick White’s Voss;
Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain,
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle;
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago;
Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!;
Max Frisch’s Homo Faber;
Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending;
Jean Genet’s The Balcony;
Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party;
Harold Pinter’s The Room;
Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer;
Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington.
Death of Oliver St. John Gogarty, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - 1958 in literature –
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart;
Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy;
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard);
Leon Uris’s Exodus;
Terry Southern’s Candy;
Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums;
Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington;
R. K. Narayan’s The Guide;
Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party first performed;
Jean Genet’s The Blacks;
Josef Skvorecky’s The Cowards;
Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence.
Death of Cyril M. Kornbluth, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Roger Martin du Gard - 1959 in literature –
William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch;
Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum;
Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half-past Nine;
Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros);
André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just;
Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian;
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth;
Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz;
Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth;
John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance;
Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro;
Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons;
Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone.
Death of Edwin Muir, Raymond Chandler
