- Europe
North Sea flood and the Delta Works
A storm surge floods the southwest, killing more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands and prompting the construction of the Delta Works flood defences.
Era: The World Wars, Decolonisation and the Modern Netherlands
Sources: North Sea flood of 1953 · Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Africa
The Batepá massacre
Under Governor Carlos Gorgulho, colonial police and settlers killed many Forro islanders who resisted forced labour — a massacre, with the toll uncertain, that became the founding memory of São Toméan nationalism.
Era: Batepá, the MLSTP and the road to independence
Sources: Batepá Massacre · Museu do Aljube (Resistance and Freedom Museum, Lisbon), Batepá massacre · Wikipedia, The February 1953 Massacre in São Tomé: Crack in the Salazarist Image of Multiracial Harmony · Academic article (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute)
- Asia
Great Leap Forward and the great famine
Mao's Great Leap Forward forces rapid collectivization and crude industrialization, causing a famine from 1959 to 1961 that killed an estimated 15 million to tens of millions of people.
Era: The People's Republic: Revolution, Upheaval, and Reform
Sources: Great Leap Forward · Encyclopaedia Britannica, Great Leap Forward famine · EBSCO Research Starters
Catastrophe in the 1950s
Every event in the Terralore archive tagged catastrophe — plague, famine, earthquake and other disasters, narrowed to the 1950s — 3 of them, drawn from 3 nations, running from 1953 to 1958. Each entry keeps the sources it was verified against and links back to the chronicle it came from.
- Events
- 3
- Nations
- 3
- Earliest
- 1953
- Latest
- 1958
- Africa
- 1
- Asia
- 1
- Europe
- 1
Every entry below is the same record, with the same sources, as the one on its nation’s chronicle.