The New York Yankees played in five of the decade's 10 World Series match-ups, winning four of them.

On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was on his way to a prayer meeting when a Hindu nationalist fired three bullets into his chest from a pistol at close range. Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition, and his ashes were poured into urns which were sent all across India for memorial services. Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune (where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944) and another rests in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.

From 1941 to 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany systematically murdered about six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe.

One of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, Anne Frank gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Slinky was invented and developed by American naval engineer Richard T. James in 1943 and demonstrated at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945. The toy was a hit, selling its entire inventory of 400 units in ninety minutes.

Construction of Mount Rushmore began in 1927, and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. After sculptor Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the project. The original design was a sculpture of each president down to their waists, but time constraints and lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941, after 14 years.

Dr. Spock's book arrived just in time for the start of the post-war Baby Boom. Its message to mothers: "you know more than you think you do."

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert, near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. The texts have great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the second-oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible.

On November 1, 1946, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the Toronto Huskies hosted the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens, in a game the NBA now refers to as the first game played in NBA history. The first basket was made by Ossie Schectman of the Knickerbockers.

On 25 April 1945, 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference and started drafting the Charter of the United Nations, which was adopted on 25 June 1945. Pursuant to the Charter, the UN's objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law.