- Outgoing President Eisenhower issues warning of a "military industrial complex" developing in America
- President Kennedy establishes Peace Corps
- Cuban exiles fail in their bid to invade Cuba through the Bay of Pigs; President Kennedy accepts responsibility
- Soviets build wall dividing East and West Berlin
- Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann tried in Israel, found guilty
- "Freedom Riders" travel throughout the South to test and promote integration measures; many are assaulted and beaten
MAJOR EVENTS:
- Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes first human in space during a single-orbit flight
- Commander Alan Shephard Jr. becomes first American in space in a suborbital flight aboard Mercury 3; Virgil Grissom follows in similar fashion two months later
- Soviet space probe Venera 1 becomes the first man-made vehicle to reach another planet when it arrives at Venus
- First lasers developed
- Anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discover Homo habilis in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY:
- World Series: New York Yankees over Cincinnati, 4-1
- Ty Cobb dies
SPORTS:
- Movies: West Side Story, The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremburg
- Songs: Moon River, Where the Boys Are, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Blue Moon, The Lion Sleeps Tonight
- TV Shows: Bullwinkle, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, Hazel, Dick Van Dyke Show, Top Cat
- Books: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins; The Making of the President: 1960, Theodore White; The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone; The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
- Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer published legally in the U.S. for the first time
- Ernest Hemmingway dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound
- Gary Cooper dies
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT:
- Electric toothbrushes introduced
- "Frito" corn chips appear
EVERYDAY LIFE:
- "Barbie" gets a boyfriend when the "Ken" doll is introduced
