1945 – General: Harry Truman takes over presidency after death of Franklin D. Roosevelt; first atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan (189,000 casualties), then Nagasaki; end of WW II.
Culture: Art: Abstract Expressionist art is thriving throughout the Beat Era with such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, many of whom gathered in the Greenwich Village scene; Broadway: Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and He Touched Me; Films: The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, The Body Snatcher; Media: radio: “Queen for a Day,” “Arthur Godfrey Time,” “One Man’s Family” (soap opera); television: Macy’s first Thanksgiving Day Parade; Music: Be-Bop jazz evolves with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; Fiction: Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Orwell’s Animal Farm; Nonfiction: Louis Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley; Poetry: Gwendolyn Brooks’ A Street in Bronzeville W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems

Cleveland: Cleveland Community Relations Board formed to promote racial harmony.
The American Weave Literary Journal (1945–1964) published by Loring E. Williams and Alice Crane Williams from their home at 23728 Glenhill Drive, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44121. Printing was performed by Villier’s Publishers Ltd., Ingestre, London NW5 England. When Alice died in 1964, Loring moved back to Maine. Editors Alfred B. Cahen, David C. French and James L. Weil continued to publish this collection of poems and light verse until 1971. *Alice Crane Williams was the Aunt of famed Cleveland area poet Hart Crane. The journal was partially funded by the Hart Crane Memorial Fund and the Alice Crane Williams Memorial Fund. Final address for the publication offices was 4109 Bushnell Road, University Heights, Ohio 44118. Local poets from the Cleveland Poetry Society at Fenn College (now Cleveland State University) were frequent submitters to American Weave