Off the top of my head, I know that Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, and that the Brown V Board of Education case came before the Supreme Court, a case in which the court voted unanimously to find segregation in schools to be unconstitutional.
The rest is with an assist from Wikipedia… the year 1954 started on a Friday; Jonas Salk announced the polio vaccine, and the first doses would be administered in Pittsburgh; West Germany won its first World Cup title, over Hungary; Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel; there was a coup d’etat in Guatemala; Hurricane Hazel devastated the Caribbean, U.S., and Canada; the Castle Bravo and Castle Romeo (hydrogen) nuclear tests were conducted in the Marshall Islands; the first operational subway line was opened in Toronto; The U.S. Air Force Academy was founded; Arturo Toscanini’s retirement was announced after a performance at Carnegie Hall, during which he had a memory lapse; President Eisenhower laid out what became known as the Domino Theory at a news conference in April; April 11 was denoted as the Most Boring Day in the 20th Century; Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe got married; Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile, in England; the words “under God” are added to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance; Diane Leather was the first woman to run a sub-5 minute mile, also in England; Joseph McCarthy’s popularity declines after Special Counsel Joseph N. Welch lashed out with his now famous attack–“Have you, at long last, no decency?”
There is much more, but one last entry: food rationing ended in Great Britain, 14 years after it began early in WWII, and almost a decade after the war ended.
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