1951

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Centuries:	[[19Template:Ordinal/th century]] - [[20Template:Ordinal/th century]] - [[21Template:Ordinal/th century]]
Decades:	1920s 1930s 1940s - 1950s - 1960s 1970s 1980s
Years:	1948 1949 1950 - 1951 - 1952 1953 1954

Template:C20YearInTopicX Year 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday. Template:C20YearTOCship

Events of 1951

January

January 9 - United Nations headquarters officially opens in New York City.

Image:United Nations HQ - New York City.jpg

January 9: United Nations headquarters opened.

January 15 - Ilse Koch, The "Witch of Buchenwald," wife of the Commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment in a court in West Germany.
January 17 - Korean War: Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul.
January 20 - Avalanches in the Alps - 240 die and 45,000 are buried for a time in Switzerland, Austria and Italy.
January 27 - Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site begins with a one-kiloton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flats, northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.

February

February 1 - United Nations General Assembly declares that China is the aggressor in the Korean War.
February 4-8 - Surgeons remove an ovarian cyst from Gertrude Levandowski in 96-hour long operation in Chicago. She loses almost half of her weight and emerges weighing 140 kg.
February 6
- A Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train derails near Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, killing 85 people and injuring over 500 - one of the worst rail disasters in American history.
February 12 - Marriage of Muhammad Reza Shah to Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari.
February 19- Jean Lee becomes the last woman hanged in Australia, when Lee and her two pimps are hanged for the murder and torture of a 73 year old bookmaker.
February 27 - The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.
February 28 - Linus Pauling, Robert Corey, and Herman Branson publish the findings of the α-helix and the β-sheet.

March

Image:Julius and Ethel Rosenberg NYWTS.jpg

March 29: Rosenbergs.

March 6 - The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins.
March 7 - Korean War: Operation Ripper - In Korea, United Nations troops led by General Matthew Ridgeway begin an assault against the Chinese "volunteers".
March 12 - The Dennis the Menace comic strip appears in newspapers across the U.S. for the first time.
March 14
- Korean War: For the second time, United Nations troops recapture Seoul.
- West Germany joins UNESCO.
March 29 - Second Red Scare: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. On April 5 they are sentenced to receive the death penalty.
March 29 - Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I opens on Broadway and runs for three years. It is the first Rodgers and Hammerstein show specifically written for someone - actress Gertrude Lawrence. Lawrence is stricken with cancer during the run of the show and dies halfway through its run. The show makes a star of Yul Brynner.
March 31 - Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau.

Image:UNIVAC 1 demo.jpg

March 30: UNIVAC I.

April

April 1 - Female suffrage begins in Greece.
April 11 - U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieves General Douglas MacArthur of his Far Eastern commands.
April 18 - Treaty of Paris (1951) adopted, establishing European Coal and Steel Community.
April 21 - The National Olympic Committee of the Soviet Union is formed. The USSR first participates in the Olympic Games at Helsinki, Finland, in 1952.
April 24 - In Yokohama, Japan a fire on a train leaves more than 100 dead.
April 28 - Robert Menzies' Liberal Party government in Australia is re-elected for a second term.

May

May 1 - Opera house of Geneva, Switzerland is almost destroyed in a fire.
May 3
- HM King George VI opens London's Royal Festival Hall as patron.
- Opening of the Festival of Britain
- The U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations begins its closed door hearings into the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by U.S. President Harry S. Truman.
May 9 - The first test of a nuclear weapon with thermonuclear materials, the "George" test on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, by the United States.
May 14 - First volunteer-run passenger trains run on Talyllyn Railway, Wales.
May 15 - Military coup in Bolivia
May 21 - Ninth Street Show, otherwise known as the 9th Street Art Exhibition, was a gathering of a number of notable artists, and it was the stepping-out of the post war New York avant-garde, collectively known as the New York School.
May 25 - The first test of an atomic bomb "boosted" by the inclusion of thermonuclear materials, in the "Item" test on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands by the U.S.

June

June 14 - UNIVAC I is dedicated by U.S. Census Bureau.^[1]
June 15 - July 1- In New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, thousands of hectares of forests were destroyed in fires.

July

July 1 - Judy Garland opens the first of 14 concerts in Dublin, Ireland at the Theatre Royal.
July 5 - William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announce the invention of the junction transistor.
July 10 - Korean War: At Kaesong, armistice negotiations begin.
July 13
- The Great Flood of 1951 reaches its highest point in Northeast Kansas, culminating in the greatest flood damage to date in the Midwestern United States.
- MGM's Technicolor film version of Show Boat, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel, premieres at Radio City Music Hall. The 1951 film introduces bass-baritone William Warfield (singing Ol' Man River) and makes him nationally famous overnight.
July 14 - In Joplin, Missouri, the George Washington Carver National Monument becomes the first United States National Monument in honor of an African American.
July 16 - King Léopold III of Belgium signs the act of abdication in favour of his son Baudouin.
July 17
- Baudouin takes the oath as king of Belgium, after his father abdicated the day before.
- Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts is chartered.
July 20 - King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.
July 30 - David Lean's Oliver Twist is finally shown in the United States, after ten minutes of supposedly anti-Semitic references and closeups of Alec Guinness as Fagin are cut. The film is a critical success, but a financial flop in the United States, and receives few bookings in U.S. theatres, mostly due to the anti-Semitic charges leveled against it. The film is not shown uncut in the U.S. until 1970.

August

August 11 - René Pleven becomes Prime Minister of France.

September

September 1 - The United States, Australia and New Zealand all sign a mutual defense pact, called the ANZUS Treaty.
September 8 - Treaty of San Francisco: In San Francisco, California, 48 nations sign a peace treaty with Japan in formal recognition of the end of the Pacific War.
September 9 - Chinese communist forces move into Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
September 10 - The United Kingdom begins an economic boycott of Iran.
September 18 - The film A Streetcar Named Desire premieres and becomes a critical and box-office smash.
September 20 - NATO accepts Greece and Turkey as members.
September 26-28 - Blue sun seen over Europe: the effect is due to ash coming from the Canadian forest fires four months previously.

October

October 3 - "Shot Heard 'Round the World" One of the greatest moments in Major League Baseball history occurs when the New York Giants' Bobby Thomson hits a game winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning off of the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, to win the National League pennant after being down 14 games.
October 4
- The Gene Kelly film An American in Paris premieres in New York.
Shoppers World opens in Framingham, Massachusetts. It is one the first shopping malls in the U.S.
October 7 - Malayan Emergency - communist insurgents kill British commander Sir Henry Gurney
October 15
- First oral contraceptive invented by Luis E. Miramontes
- I Love Lucy debuts on CBS.
October 16
- Judy Garland begins her legendary concerts in New York's Palace Theatre
- Assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan
October 20 - The "Johnny Bright Incident" occurred in Stillwater, Oklahoma
October 21 - Storm in southern Italy - over 100 dead
October 24 - U.S. President Harry Truman declares official end to war with Germany.
October 26 - Winston Churchill re-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; his foreign minister is Anthony Eden
October 27 - Farouk of Egypt declares himself king of Sudan, with no support.
October 31 - Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim, opens in England.

November

November 1 - First military exercises for nuclear war, with infantry troops included, in the Nevada desert
November 10 - Direct dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
November 11 - Juan Peron re-elected president of Argentina
November 12 - The National Ballet of Canada performs for the first time on the Eaton Auditorium
November 20 - Po river floods in northern Italy.
November 24 - The Broadway play Gigi opens starring little known actress Audrey Hepburn playing the lead character.
November 28 - Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim, opens in the United States under the title of Charles Dickens's original novel, A Christmas Carol.

December

December 3 - The Lebanese University is founded in Lebanon.
December 6 - State of emergency declared in Egypt due to increasing riots.
December 13 - Water storage tank collapses in Tucumcari, New Mexico - 4 dead, 200 buildings destroyed.
December 16 - Salar Jung Museum is opened to the public by the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru.
December 20
- EBR-1, World's first (experimental) nuclear power plant opened.
- A chartered C46 Curtis Commando crash lands in Cobourg, Ontario Canada - all on board survived.
December 23 - The film The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, premieres in Hollywood.
December 24
- Libya becomes independent from Italy.
- Gian-Carlo Menotti's 45-minute opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, premieres live on NBC, becoming the first opera written especially for television.

Undated

A fourth, and final, forest fire starts in the Tillamook Burn; but unlike earlier fires this one only burns 32,700 acres, and within area already affected by the earlier fires.
The most complete recording of Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess made until then, a 3-LP Columbia Masterworks Records 129-minute album in mono, is released to great critical acclaim. There will be no truly complete recording of Porgy and Bess until 1976.
A research team publishes the Interlingua-English Dictionary.
IBM United Kingdom is formed.
1951 New Zealand waterfront dispute lasts for 151 days.
Munich Germany – A collection of mementos and personal papers belonging to Adolf Hitler are turned over to Bayerische Landesbank for authentication and eventual sale. Among the documents are his appointment as Chancellor signed by President Paul von Hindenburg, his Austrian passport, as well as an assortment of swastika insignia pins and medals. An initial offer of $200,000.00 was made for the collection.^[2]