1959
year
1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1959th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 959th year of the 2nd millennium, the 59th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1950s decade.
Events
January
January 1 – Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when the forces of Fidel Castro advance.
January 2 – Soviet lunar probe Luna 1 is the first human-made object to attain escape velocity from Earth. It reaches the vicinity of Earth's Moon, where it was intended to crash-land, but instead becomes the first spacecraft to go into heliocentric orbit.
January 3
Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state.
The southernmost island of the Maldives archipelago, Addu Atoll, declares its independence from the Kingdom of the Maldives, initiating the United Suvadive Republic.
January 4
In Cuba, rebel troops led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos enter the city of Havana.
Léopoldville riots: At least 49 people are killed during clashes between the police and participants of a meeting of the ABAKO Party in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo.
January 6 – The International Maritime Organization is inaugurated.
January 7 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1959” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “year” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5302. The Library of Congress control number is sh2009002452. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1959” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.