Mike Ilitch and his wife Marian opened the first Little Caesars pizza restaurant in Garden City, Michigan.McDonald’s opened its 100th restaurant, and the one-billionth can of Spam was sold.There were 32,000 supermarkets in the U.S., and 15,000 delis in New York City.American businesswoman Ruth Handler was credited with creating Barbie by using a German doll named Bild Lilli as her inspiration.

The first Barbie doll went on display at the American Toy Fair in New York.

The San Francisco Giants named their new baseball stadium Candlestick Park.

The AFL's original lineup consisted of “an Eastern division of the New York Titans, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, and the Houston Oilers, and a Western division of the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and Dallas Texans.”

The American Football League (AFL) was founded.

Here are some sports facts from 1959: The Boston Celtics were the NBA champs, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series, and the Montreal Canadiens clinched the Stanley Cup.

British paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a human skull in Tanzania that was about 1.8 million years old.

The Ford Motor Company discontinued the troubled Edsel brand, and the last car rolled off the assembly line in November.

(The tragedy popularized Don McLean's 1972 song- American Pie.) All four occupants on board, including the pilot Roger Peterson, were killed. A chartered plane that was transporting rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed in foggy conditions near Clear Lake, Iowa.(Truman Capote’s best-selling novel, In Cold Blood, published in 1966, details the quadruple murder.) Two ex-convicts, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, were found guilty of the murders and sentenced to death. In the killing that shocked the nation, four members of the Clutter family-Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon-were brutally murdered in Holcomb, Kansas.However, the Eisenhower administration never took action on the measure. Congress passed legislation authorizing the Secretary of Agriculture to run a Food Stamp program through 1962.Lawrence Seaway-an elaborate system of locks and canals in both the United States and Canada that would connect the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean.) (In 1954, President Eisenhower signed legislation authorizing the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. So what caused the steelworkers to go on strike? explains that the steelworkers demanded “that the union give up a clause in their contract which limited management’s ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery that would result in reduced hours or numbers of employees.” From July 15 to November 7, a 116-day steel strike idled the steel industry throughout the United States.They were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. NASA announced its selection of the seven military pilots-the “Mercury Seven”-who would become the first U.S.An additional 10,786 soldiers died out of battle, making a total of 58,220 deaths.) (Approximately 47,434 American soldiers were killed in battle during the Vietnam conflict. Buis became the first Americans to be killed in action in Vietnam. The United States recognized Fidel Castro’s new Cuban government, and believed that it could work with the new regime.(The new flag became official on July 4, 1960.) President Eisenhower issued an order for an updated American flag that featured 50 stars arranged in staggered rows: five six-star rows and four five-star rows.In 1959, Alaska and Hawaii were admitted, individually, as the 49th and 50th states of the Union. On July 12, 1898, the Newlands Resolution was passed by Congress to annex the independent Republic of Hawaii. On October 18, 1867, the United States took possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for less than two cents an acre.Here is a summary of the top news stories and history events that happened in 1959:

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