1951
year
1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1951st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 951st year of the 2nd millennium, the 51st year of the 20th century, and the 2nd year of the 1950s decade.
Events
January
January 4 – Korean War: Third Battle of Seoul – Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time (having lost the Second Battle of Seoul in September 1950).
January 9 – The Government of the United Kingdom announces abandonment of the Tanganyika groundnut scheme for the cultivation of peanuts in the Tanganyika Territory, with the writing off of £36.5M debt.
January 11 – In the U.S., a top secret report is delivered to U.S. President Truman by his National Security Resources Board, urging Truman to expand the Korean War by launching "a global offensive against communism" with sustained bombing of Red China and diplomatic moves to establish "moral justification" for a U.S. nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The report will not be declassified until 1978.
January 15 – In a criminal court in West Germany, Ilse Koch, The "Witch of Buchenwald", wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment.
January 20 – Winter of Terror: Avalanches in the Alps kill 240 and bury 45,000 for a time, in Switzerland, Austria and Italy.
January 21 – Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea erupts catastrophically, killing nearly 3,000 people and causing great devastation in Oro Province.
January 25 – Dutch author Anne de Vries releases the first volume of his children's novel Journey Through the Night (Reis door de nacht), set during World War II.
February
February – The Convention People's Party wins national elections in Gold Coast (British colony).
February 1–2 – The 1951 Nepalese revolution leads to agreement for a democratic constitution.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1951” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18591. The Library of Congress control number is sh2007006517. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1950 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “1951” 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.