What happened in 1957, month by month, from Elvis to Sputnik

Searching for one year and finding ten wrong answers

You type "what happened in 1957" into a search box. You want to write a toast, or fill a card, or just know.

The first list says the 1957 Oscars went to Around the World in 80 Days. The second list puts a famous boxing rematch in the wrong year. The third has no dates at all.

You start to wonder which parts are true. You close the tab.

Why most 1957 lists get it wrong

Dates and prices from the 1950s get copied from site to site until nobody knows where they came from. A small slip on one site turns into a fact on fifty.

Award years are the classic trap. The Oscars held in March 1957 were for films from 1956. The films of 1957 were honored in March 1958, when The Bridge on the River Kwai won seven awards. Both statements are true, and they are about different things.

Sports has the same trap. Carmen Basilio took the middleweight title from Sugar Ray Robinson on September 23, 1957. Robinson won it back the next March. The two fights are often filed under one year.

Read 1957 one month at a time

The real shift is to stop thinking of 1957 as one year. It was twelve months, and they did not feel alike. Here is one event from each.

• January. On the 6th, CBS filmed Elvis from the waist up on The Ed Sullivan Show.
• February. A mine blast on the 4th and a nursing home fire on the 17th killed 109 people between them.
• March. The Cat in the Hat came out on the 12th. Elvis bought Graceland for $102,500.
• April. Ford put the Skyliner on sale, with a steel roof that folded into the trunk.
• May. Baseball owners voted to let the Dodgers and Giants move to California.
• June. The new flu's first American outbreak began on a navy ship in Rhode Island.
• July. Althea Gibson won Wimbledon on the 6th.
• August. American Bandstand went national. The economy quietly turned into a recession.
• September. The Little Rock Nine walked into Central High on the 25th, escorted by soldiers.
• October. Sputnik went up on the 4th. The Braves won the World Series.
• November. The Mackinac Bridge opened. A dog named Laika went into orbit.
• December. The Vanguard rocket exploded on its pad on the 6th, on live TV.

Put the months side by side and the year starts to talk. In July the country cheered Althea Gibson. Eleven weeks later it took a division of the Army to get nine Black teenagers through a school door in Arkansas. The National Park Service timeline has every date of the crisis.

Or take the sky. The country spent October hearing a Soviet ball beep overhead. Then, in December, it watched its own rocket fall over. NASA's history office tells that morning in full.

A second event for each month

One line a month is a start. Here is one more from each month, all from the book's almanac.

• January. On the 20th and 21st, Eisenhower was sworn in for his second term, twice: privately on the Sunday, publicly on the Monday.
• February. On the 26th, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas signed four segregation bills into law.
• March. On the 6th, Ghana became independent from Britain, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to do so.
• April. On the 17th, a New York Times report on a flu outbreak in Hong Kong led a scientist named Maurice Hilleman to warn of a pandemic.
• May. On the 2nd, Senator Joseph McCarthy died at forty-eight.
• June. On the 27th, Hurricane Audrey came ashore near the Texas and Louisiana border. At least 416 people died.
• July. On the 16th, Marine major John Glenn flew from California to New York in three hours and twenty-three minutes, a speed record.
• August. On the 28th, Senator Strom Thurmond began a filibuster against the civil rights bill that ran 24 hours and 18 minutes.
• September. On the 5th, Jack Kerouac's On the Road came out. On the 9th, Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
• October. On the 8th, the Dodgers said they were leaving Brooklyn for Los Angeles.
• November. On the 24th, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! came out. On the 25th, Eisenhower had a mild stroke.
• December. On the 2nd, the Shippingport plant near Pittsburgh became the first full-scale US nuclear plant built only to make power for homes and businesses.

1957 outside America

Some lists lead with world news. The book is about American life, but its almanac does note the big world events.

• March 6. Ghana became independent.
• March 25. Six European countries signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community.
• July 1. The International Geophysical Year began, an 18-month science effort. Both the Soviet and American satellite programs ran under it.
• August 31. The Federation of Malaya became independent from Britain.
• October 4 and November 3. Sputnik 1, then Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika on board.

How the jobs picture changed during the year

1957 began as a good year for work and ended in a slump. The book follows the jobless rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nobody announced a recession in August. As the book puts it, nobody rings a bell.

If you are doing this for someone born in 1957, start with their birth month. That is the month their parents were living through, with a new baby in the house.

The almanac behind this page

This is the problem The Year You Arrived: 1957 was written for. We built the list above from its pages, and the book goes much further.

The Year, Month by Month gives every month its own page. Each one has the news, the top record in the shops, the jobless rate and the prices recorded that month. In October, eggs reached 69.5 cents a dozen, the most all year.

The News They Read tells the big stories in full: Eisenhower's second term, Little Rock, Sputnik, the Vanguard rocket and the flu. It also explains why life expectancy for a 1957 baby dipped to 69.5 years, the low point of that run.

The Sporting Year covers the year New York lost two baseball teams, the double-overtime NBA final and a jockey who stood up too soon at the Kentucky Derby.

For the prices on their own, see our page on what things cost in 1957.