On this day

April 4, 1949

Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.

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Notable Births

1949Junior Braithwaite, Jamaican-American singer (died 1999)[†]

Franklin Delano Alexander "Junior" Braithwaite was a reggae musician from Kingston, Jamaica and the youngest member of the vocal group, The Wailing Wailers.

1949Litsa Diamanti, Greek singer[†]

Litsa Diamanti is a Greek laïko singer who became famous in the 1960s and 1970s. She has been described as the "child-wonder of the Sixties decade and the absolute diva of metapolitefsi." Her hits have been described as "all-time classics."

Shing-Tung Yau

1949Shing-Tung Yau, Chinese-American mathematician and academic[†]

Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.

Historical Events

Cold War

1949Cold War: Twelve nations sign the North Atlantic Treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.[†]

The Cold War was a period of global geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which began in the aftermath of the Second World War and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an arms race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the Space Race, espionage, propaganda campaigns, embargoes, and sports diplomacy.