All year, 1953. The First Indochina War: French forces continue to fight the Viet Minh independence movement in Vietnam. The French have been fighting to retain control of the Indochinese countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam since the end of World War II.

January 14, 1953. Communist leader and war hero Josip Broz,also known as Marshal Tito, is elected president of Yugoslavia. Tito is a dedicated Communist, but he and the other leader of the Communist bloc, Josef Stalin, are openly estranged and at odds with one another.
Tito’s message to Stalin in : “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (…) If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”

March 5, 1953. Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years, dies of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 73.

April 25, 1953. Scientists Francis Crick and James D. Watson of Cambridge University in England publish their discoveries of the double helix structure of DNA.

May 29, 1953. Sir Edmund Hilary of New Zealand and Nepali Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

June 18, 1953. Army leaders depose King Faud of Egypt and declare Egypt a republic.

July 27, 1953. The Korean War ends after three years of fighting and over two million lives lost. United Nations, South Korea, the United States, People’s Republic of China, and North Korea sign an armistice at Panmunjom.

August 8, 1953. Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.

August 19, 1953. The United States and the United Kingdom help to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and retain Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne.

November 9, 1953. Cambodia becomes independent from France.