Inauguration of Brasília
A plane-shaped capital raised in the savanna in four years
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President Juscelino Kubitschek promised 'fifty years of progress in five' and moved the capital from the coast to the empty interior. The city, laid out by Lúcio Costa in a plan resembling a plane with outspread wings and filled with Oscar Niemeyer's buildings, was built in under four years. Brasília became the capital on 21 April 1960 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 21 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 13 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 12 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 11 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 20 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 24 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 19 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 7 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 3 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 1 year later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 19 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 18 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 15 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 3 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 1 year later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 12 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 19 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 20 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 4 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 2 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — same year
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 3 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 7 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 15 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 7 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — 2 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 4 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 15 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 24 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 19 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 18 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 6 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 1 year earlier
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 86)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 79)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 71)
- Mao Zedong (aged 67)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 42)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 31)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 30)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 26)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 76)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 71)