• Harry Truman was inaugurated as U.S. president after being elected in 1948 to his own term; previously he was sworn in following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He authorized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively.
• Doris Day enters the public spotlight with the films My Dream Is Yours and It’s a Great Feeling as well as popular songs like “It’s Magic”; divorces her second husband.
• Red China: The Communist Party of China wins the Chinese Civil War, establishing the People’s Republic of China.
• Johnnie Ray signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records, although he would not become popular for another two years.
• South Pacific, the prize-winning musical, opens on Broadway on April 7.
• Walter Winchell is an aggressive radio and newspaper journalist credited with inventing the gossip column.
• Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees go to the World Series five times in the 1940s, winning four of them.

• Joe McCarthy, the US Senator, gains national attention and begins his anti-communist crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.
• Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.
• Studebaker, a popular car company, begins its financial downfall.
• Television is becoming widespread throughout Europe and North America.
• North Korea and South Korea declare war after Northern forces stream south on June 25.
• Marilyn Monroe soars in popularity with five new movies, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and attempts suicide after the death of friend Johnny Hyde who asked to marry her several times, but she refused respectfully. Monroe would later (1954) be married for a brief time to Joe DiMaggio (mentioned in the previous verse).

• The Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius, were convicted on March 29 for espionage.
• H-Bomb is in the middle of its development as a nuclear weapon, announced in early 1950 and first tested in late 1952.
• Sugar Ray Robinson, a champion welterweight boxer.
• Panmunjom, the border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War.
• Marlon Brando is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire.
• The King and I, musical, opens on Broadway on March 29.
• The Catcher in the Rye, a controversial novel by J. D. Salinger, is published.

• Dwight D. Eisenhower is first elected as U.S. president, winning by a landslide margin of 442 to 89 electoral votes.
• The vaccine for polio is privately tested by Jonas Salk.
• England’s got a new queen: Queen Elizabeth II succeeds to the throne upon the death of her father, George VI, and is crowned the next year.
• Rocky Marciano defeats Jersey Joe Walcott, becoming the world Heavyweight champion.
• Liberace has a popular 1950s television show for his musical entertainment.
• Santayana goodbye: George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, dies on September 26.

• Joseph Stalin dies on March 5, yielding his position as leader of the Soviet Union.
• Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Stalin for six months following his death. Malenkov had presided over Stalin’s purges of party “enemies”, but would be spared a similar fate by Nikita Khrushchev mentioned later in verse.
• Gamal Abdel Nasser acts as the true power behind the new Egyptian nation as Muhammad Naguib’s minister of the interior.
• Sergei Prokofiev, the composer, dies on March 5, the same day as Stalin.
• Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife Barbara are involved in a highly publicized divorce, culminating in 1954 with a record-breaking $5.5 million settlement.[12]
• Roy Campanella, an African-American baseball catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, receives the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for the second time.
• Communist bloc is a group of communist nations dominated by the Soviet Union at this time. Probably a reference to the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany.

• Roy Cohn resigns as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and enters private practice with the fall of McCarthy. He also worked to prosecute the Rosenbergs, mentioned earlier.
• Juan Perón spends his last full year as President of Argentina before a September 1955 coup.
• Arturo Toscanini is at the height of his fame as a conductor, performing regularly with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on national radio.
• Dacron is an early artificial fiber made from the same plastic as polyester.
• Dien Bien Phu falls. A village in North Vietnam falls to Viet Minh forces under Vo Nguyen Giap, leading to the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states.
• “Rock Around the Clock” is a hit single released by Bill Haley & His Comets in May, spurring worldwide interest in rock and roll music.

• Albert Einstein dies on April 18 at the age of 76.
• James Dean achieves success with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, gets nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and dies in a car accident on September 30 at the age of 24.
• Brooklyn’s got a winning team: The Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series for the only time before their move to Los Angeles.
• Davy Crockett is a Disney television miniseries about the legendary frontiersman of the same name. The show was a huge hit with young boys and inspired a short-lived “coonskin cap” craze.
• Peter Pan is broadcast on TV live and in color from the 1954 version of the stage musical starring Mary Martin on March 7. Disney released an animated version the previous year.
• Elvis Presley signs with RCA Records on November 21, beginning his pop career.
• Disneyland opens on July 17, 1955 as Walt Disney’s first theme park.

• Brigitte Bardot appears in her first mainstream film And God Created Woman and establishes an international reputation as a French “sex kitten”.
• Budapest is the capital city of Hungary and site of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
• Alabama is the site of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ultimately led to the removal of the last race laws in the USA. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr figure prominently.
• Nikita Khrushchev makes his famous Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality” on February 25.
• Princess Grace Kelly releases her last film, High Society, and marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco.
• Peyton Place, the best-selling novel by Grace Metalious, is published. Though mild compared to today’s prime time, it shocked the reserved values of the 1950s.
• Trouble in the Suez: The Suez Crisis boils as Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal on October 29.

• Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of an anti-integration standoff, as Governor Orval Faubus stops the Little Rock Nine from attending Little Rock Central High School and President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys the 101st Airborne Division to counteract him.
• Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, publishes his famous novel Doctor Zhivago.
• Mickey Mantle is in the middle of his career as a famous New York Yankees outfielder and American League All-Star for the sixth year in a row.
• Jack Kerouac publishes his first novel in seven years, On the Road.
• Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, marking the start of the space race.
• Chou En-Lai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, survives an assassination attempt on the charter airliner Kashmir Princess.
• Bridge on the River Kwai is released as a film adaptation of the 1954 novel and receives seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.[13]

• Lebanon is engulfed in a political and religious crisis that eventually involves U.S. intervention.
• Charles de Gaulle is elected first president of the French Fifth Republic following the Algerian Crisis.
• California baseball begins as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California and become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. They are the first major league teams west of Kansas City.
• Charles Starkweather Homicide captures the attention of Americans, in which he kills eleven people between January 25 and 29 before being caught in a massive manhunt in Douglas, Wyoming.
• Children of Thalidomide: Mothers taking the drug Thalidomide had children born with congenital birth defects caused by the sleeping aid and antiemetic, which was also used at times to treat morning sickness.

• Buddy Holly dies in a plane crash on February 3 with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, in a day that had a devastating impact on the country and youth culture. Joel prefaces the lyric with a Holly signature vocal hiccup: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
• Ben-Hur, a film based around the New Testament starring Charlton Heston, wins eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• Space Monkey: Able and Miss Baker return to Earth from space aboard the flight Jupiter AM-18.
• The Mafia are the center of attention for the FBI and public attention builds to this organized crime society with a historically Sicilian-American origin.
• Hula hoops reach 100 million in sales as the latest toy fad.
• Fidel Castro comes to power after a revolution in Cuba and visits the United States later that year on an unofficial twelve-day tour.
• Edsel is a no-go: Production of this car marque ends after only three years due to poor sales.

• U-2: An American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960.
• Syngman Rhee was rescued by the CIA after being forced to resign as leader of South Korea for allegedly fixing an election and embezzling more than US $20 million.
• Payola, illegal payments for radio broadcasting of songs, was publicized due to Dick Clark’s testimony before Congress and Alan Freed’s public disgrace.
• John F. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the November 8 general election.
• Chubby Checker popularizes the dance The Twist with his cover of the song of the same name.
• Psycho: An Alfred Hitchcock thriller, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and adapted by Joseph Stefano, which becomes a landmark in graphic violence and cinema sensationalism. The screeching violins heard briefly in the background of the song are a trademark of the film’s soundtrack.
• Belgians in the Congo: The Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) was declared independent of Belgium on June 30, with Joseph Kasavubu as President and Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister.

• Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2 after a long battle with depression.
• Adolf Eichmann, a “most wanted” Nazi war criminal, is traced to Argentina and captured by Mossad agents. He is covertly taken to Israel where he is put on trial for crimes against humanityin Germany during World War II, convicted, and hanged.
• Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein, is a breakthrough best-seller with themes of sexual freedom and liberation.
• Bob Dylan is signed to Columbia Records after a New York Times review by critic Robert Shelton.
• Berlin is separated into West Berlin and East Berlin, and from the rest of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall is erected on August 13 to prevent citizens escaping to the West.
• The Bay of Pigs Invasion fails, an attempt by United States-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.

• Lawrence of Arabia: The Academy Award-winning film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence starring Peter O’Toole premieres in America on December 16.
• British Beatlemania: The Beatles, a British rock group, gain Ringo Starr as drummer and Brian Epstein as manager, and join the EMI’s Parlophone label. They soon become the world’s most famous rock band, with the word “Beatlemania” adopted by the press for their fans’ unprecedented enthusiasm. It also began the British Invasion in the United States.
• Ole’ Miss: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi
• John Glenn: Flew the first American manned orbital mission termed “Friendship 7” on February 20.
• Liston beats Patterson: Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight for the world heavyweight championship on September 25, ending in a first-round knockout. This match marked the first time Patterson had ever been knocked out and one of only eight losses in his 20-year professional career.

• Pope Paul VI: Cardinal Giovanni Montini is elected to the papacy and takes the papal name of Paul VI.
• Malcolm X makes his infamous statement “The chickens have come home to roost” about the Kennedy assassination, thus causing the Nation of Islam to censor him.
• British politician sex: The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, has a relationship with a showgirl, and then lies when questioned about it before the House of Commons. When the truth came out, it led to his own resignation and undermined the credibility of the Prime Minister.
• JFK blown away: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22 while riding in an open convertible through Dallas.

• Birth control: In the early 1960s, oral contraceptives, popularly known as “the pill”, first go on the market and are extremely popular. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 challenged a Connecticut law prohibiting contraceptives. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released a papal encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae which declared artificial birth control a sin.
• Ho Chi Minh: A Vietnamese communist, who served as President of Vietnam from 1954–1969. March 2 Operation Rolling Thunder begins bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line from North Vietnam to the Vietcong rebels in the south. On March 8, the first U.S. combat troops, 3,500 marines, land in South Vietnam.

• Richard Nixon back again: Former Vice President Nixon is elected President in 1968.

• Moonshot: Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing, successfully lands on the moon.
• Woodstock: Famous rock and roll festival of 1969 that came to be the epitome of the counterculture movement.

• Watergate: Political scandal that began when the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC was broken into. After the break-in, word began to spread that President Richard Nixon (a Republican) may have known about the break-in, and tried to cover it up. The scandal would ultimately result in the resignation of President Nixon, and to date, this remains the only time that anyone has ever resigned the United States Presidency.
• Punk rock: The Ramones form, with the Sex Pistols following in 1975, bringing in the punk era.

• Menachem Begin becomes Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and negotiates the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s president in 1978.
• Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, but he first attempted to run for the position in 1976.
• Palestine: a United Nations resolution that calls for an independent Palestinian state and to end the Israeli occupation.
• Terror on the airline: Numerous aircraft hijackings take place, specifically, the Palestinian hijack of Air France Flight 139 and the subsequent Operation Entebbe in Uganda.

• Ayatollah’s in Iran: During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the West-backed and secular Shah is overthrown as the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gains power after years in exile and forces Islamic law.
• Russians in Afghanistan: Following their move into Afghanistan, Soviet forces fight a ten-year war, from 1979 to 1989.

• Wheel of Fortune: A hit television game show which has been TV’s highest-rated syndicated program since 1983.
• Sally Ride: In 1983 she becomes the first American woman in space. Ride’s quip from space “Better than an E-ticket”, harkens back to the opening of Disneyland mentioned earlier, with the E-ticket purchase needed for the best rides.
• Heavy metal suicide: In the 1980s Ozzy Osbourne and the bands Judas Priest and Metallica were brought to court by parents who accused the musicians of hiding subliminal pro-suicide messages in their music.
• Foreign debts: Persistent U.S. trade deficits
• Homeless vets: Veterans of the Vietnam War, including many disabled ex-military, are reported to be left homeless and impoverished.
• AIDS: A collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is first detected and recognized in the 1980s, and was on its way to becoming a pandemic.
• Crack cocaine use surged in the mid-to-late 1980s.

• Bernie Goetz: On December 22, Goetz shot four young men who he said were threatening him on a New York City subway. Goetz was charged with attempted murder but was acquitted of the charges, though convicted of carrying an unlicensed gun.

• Hypodermics on the shore: Medical waste was found washed up on beaches in New Jersey after being illegally dumped at sea. Before this event, waste dumped in the oceans was an “out of sight, out of mind” affair. This has been cited as one of the crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalism.

• China’s under martial law: On May 20, China declares martial law, enabling them to use force of arms against protesting students to end the Tiananmen Square protests.
• Rock-and-roller cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars to reach the teenage and young adult demographic.

“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s been burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice?” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survived. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”

• The reason Hikaru’s clothes all seem to have the number 5 on them is because “5″ is “go” in Japanese, so it’s a pun. This is why May 5th is Hikaru no Go day; May 5th (a holiday known as Children’s Day in Japan) is also the in-universe date of the big Thing that happens in episode 60, and the irl date that the volume the Thing happens in was released in English.
• Sai’s former host, Kuwabara Torajirou (better known as Hon’inbou Shuusaku), is a real historical figure widely regarded as one of Japan’s all-time best go players. He’s best known for having 19 straight wins in the Castle Games (an important go tournament during the Edo period), and the famous “ear-reddening game”, in which he played against a higher-level player and appeared to be losing until he made a comeback with a move supposedly so good that his opponent’s ears turned red. Torajiro eventually became heir to the prestigious Honinbou go school, but never actually inherited this role; When a cholera epidemic swept Japan in 1862, Torajiro insisted on tending patience in the Honinbou house, and died of cholera himself at age 33. (His teacher and head of the school at the time, Honinbou Shuwa, didn’t die until 11 years later.) Also, yes, Torajirou shares both his last name and his title with Kuwabara-sensei (although the modern Honinbou title is a title won in a tournament, since the Honinbou school closed in 1940). It’s unclear if there’s any actual connection between them other than their names. Oh and here’s a piece of rare official art that I’m fairly certain is of Torajirou’s death. :)

• Speaking of names, Hikaru, Akira, and Akari all have first names that have to do with light or visibility (”shining/bright/glittering”, “clear/light/bright”, and “light/glowing/lamp” respectively), while Sai, Hikaru, and Akari all have last names that include the character 藤, meaning “wisteria”, associated with the Fujiwara clan. (It’s the “dou” in “Shindou”, and the “fuji” in “Fujiwara” and “Fujisaki”). Again, nobody’s 100% sure of the significance of these connections.
• Sai’s hat is called a tate-eboshi (standing cap), and his robe is called a kariginu. His clothes are typical casual wear for a Heian-era nobleman. His hair, however, is not how men wore their hair at the time, but rather how noble women did (it’s a style called “taregami”, aka keeping your hair silky and as long as you can possibly grow it). His makeup and earrings are not typical of the period. Sai also uses gender-neutral pronouns (not that this is especially noteworthy, it really just means he’s polite, Roy Mustang uses the same ones ffs), has been shown in flashbacks interacting face-to-face with both men and women at a time and place where that wasn’t really a thing unless you were married or biologically related, and the publishers for the English edition of the manga thought Sai was a lady until the author corrected them on which pronouns to use.
• Go is known as “weiqi” in China, and “baduk” in Korea. Yes, there are go leagues in other countries. Yes, there are standardized English go terms. I don’t know WHY nobody in this fucking fandom ever uses them, ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING “GO-ISHI” LITERALLY JUST MEANS “GO STONES” AND ISN’T SPECIAL, but here’s a convenient list of terminology for when you’re reading a fic and have no idea what the hell anyone’s talking about.
• There’s an old PS1 RPG that takes place in a Heian-period AU in which Akira is an onmyouji (sort of like a wizardy priest I guess), Hikaru is a police officer in Heian-kyo (the capital city), and Sai is an ex-noble and legendary go player. The three of them have to work together to save Heian-kyo from a mysterious, seemingly go-related influx of yokai attacks. You can read my incomplete translation of the game here.
• Paper Cranes by @tenspontaneite​ is the most gripping fic you will ever read for any fandom, and blissfully ship-free. Don’t read it until you’ve finished the series, but do read it!! It’s SO GOOD and I really need to catch up oh my god
• Everyone loves to mock Akira’s fashion sense, but it’s actually made worse by the anime; In the manga, his hair was black with a lavender tint, so it went well with his lavender/pink/blue wardrobe. Then the anime came along and decided to make his hair FUCKING FOREST GREEN, BECAUSE THAT LOOKS GREAT WITH LAVENDER AND HOT PINK. Sai’s lipstick was also a lot less garish in most of the manga art, and if anyone ever tries to convince you that Sai’s lips are “purple” to represent his death via drowning, they’re an idiot who does not know what a drowned corpse looks like, or what the color purple looks like. Sai’s hair was also black in the manga.
• Here’s the famous “long hair Akira” image, a drawing by Takeshi Obata of what Hikaru and Akira would look like 10 years after the end of the manga. I forgot what this was drawn for, I think the anniversary of the manga maybe? Idk. But yeah, here it is.