Apartheid begins in South Africa
Nationalists win an election in which almost only whites vote
On 26 May 1948 Daniel Malan's nationalists won the election in the Union of South Africa on a platform of apartheid — the 'separate development' of races. The new government banned mixed marriages, classified every resident by race and assigned each group its own residential areas.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 9 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 1 year earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — same year
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 1 year later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 20 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 15 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 12 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 7 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 5 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 12 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 7 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 6 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 3 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 9 years later
Middle East
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — same year
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — same year
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 5 years later
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 10 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 3 years earlier
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 1 year earlier
- 1949 Founding of the People's Republic of China — 1 year later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 5 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 18 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 19 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years earlier
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 1 year earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 21 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 22 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 12 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 7 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 6 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 6 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 11 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 79)
- Winston Churchill (aged 74)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 70)
- Albert Einstein (aged 69)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 67)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 59)
- Mao Zedong (aged 55)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 30)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 19)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 18)