1945-1980 (10-17%)

Question 1

What was the culture of the 1950s like?

Answer 1

The 1950s gave rise to a growing consumer culture - a result of increased prosperity, greater variety and availability of products, and the adeptness of advertisers in creating demand. Consumer credit also grew drastically during this period with the development of credit cards, revolving charge accounts, and easy-payment plans.

Question 2

What caused the surge in suburban living in 1950s?

Answer 2

Innovations in home building made single-family houses affordable to millions of new people [Levittowns].

Question 3

What were “Levittowns”?

Answer 3

Levittowns, named for William Levitt, were low-cost, mass-produced houses in large suburban developments that mainly popped up in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Question 4

What made the suburbs so appealing in the 1950s?

Answer 4

After WWII, Americans wanted to move to the suburbs due to the enormous importance they placed on family life, but also that these developments were typically restricted to white inhabitants.

Question 5

What was the impact of the television?

Answer 5

When the television emerged in the 1940s, it quickly became the most powerful medium of mass communication in history: Its emergence gave birth to the television industry, replacing newspapers, magazines, and radios. It created markets for companies and support for athletic events.
*Note that the popular shows of the time were ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘I Love Lucy’

Question 6

What was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and why was it important?

Answer 6

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, essentially rejecting its original 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This decision helped spark a growing civil rights movement.

Question 7

Who was Rosa Parks, and what is she remembered for?

Answer 7

Rosa Parks was an African American woman arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give her bus seat up to a white passenger. The arrest of Parks resulted in a massive boycott of the Montgomery bus system.

Question 8

What happened during the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

Answer 8

In response to the jailing of Rosa Parks, the African American community, led by Martin Luther King Jr., organized a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott put economic pressure on the company and town merchants, and forced the bus system to abandon its discriminatory seating policies.

Question 9

What were the causes of the civil rights movement?

Answer 9

The causes of the civil rights movement included the legacy of WWII, the growth of the urban black middle class, and the use of the television to spread awareness of racism.

Question 10

How did President Kennedy address the growing civil rights movement? What was the response?

Answer 10

Kennedy attempted to ignore the civil rights movement at first, but with time he realized he could no longer avoid the issue of race. Kennedy introduced new legislative proposals prohibiting segregation in “public accommodations” (stores, restaurants, etc.), barring discrimination in employment, and increasing the power of the government to file suits on behalf of school integration. In response, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched down to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history to that point. This is when Dr. King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech.

Question 11

What two important civil rights bills were passed following the March on Washington?

Answer 11

In early 1964, President Johnson finally drummed up enough support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later in 1965, following the outrage of the Selma march, President Johnson won passage of the Voting Rights Act, which provided federal protection to African Americans attempting to exercise their right to vote.

Question 12

What is affirmative action, and what was the impact of its creation?

Answer 12

Affirmative action is the concept of adopting positive measures to recruit minorities. These guidelines gradually extended to all institutions doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government.

Question 13

What two social welfare programs did the Johnson Administration put in place in the 1960s?

Answer 13

Medicare (Provided federal aid to elderly individuals for medical expenses) and Medicaid (Extended federal medical assistance to welfare recipients and other indigent people of all ages

Question 14

What was the Kennedy/Johnson “Great Society” plan?

Answer 14

A series of socioeconomic reforms, much like the New Deal. This included the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the Housing Act of 1961, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Model Cities Program, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Immigration Act of 1965, and an $11.5 billion tax cut.

Question 15

What was the OEO and why was it controversial?

Answer 15

The OEO was the Office of Economic Opportunity, and it was the heart of the Kennedy/Johnson “Great Society” plan. It created an array of new educational, employment, housing, and health-care programs. The creation of the office was controversial due to its commitment to “community action” (an effort to involve members of poor communities in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them).

Question 16

What was the legacy of the “Great Society”?

Answer 16

The high costs of the Great Society weakened the popularity of the federal efforts to solve social problems. It significantly reduced hunger, made medical care available to millions of elderly and poor people, and had the greatest reduction in poverty in American history.

Question 17

Give a post-WWII example of how American foreign policy was challenged in the mid-1900s?

Answer 17

• In 1948, Israel proclaimed its independence, which President Truman acknowledged. However, Palestinian Arabs were unwilling to be displaced from “their” country. This began the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.
• In 1956, Israeli forces attacked Egypt. British and French troops then arrived to drive the Egyptians from the Suez Canal. Eisenhower feared the Suez crisis would drive the Arab states toward the Soviet Union and precipitate a new world war. So, the U.S. and the U.N. denounced the invasion, pressured the French and British to withdraw, and persuaded Israel to agree to a truce with Egypt.
• In 1958, Communist Party chief, Nikita Khrushchev, demanded that NATO powers abandon West Berlin. Khrushchev and Eisenhower were set to meet in Paris to resolve the conflict, but days before the meeting, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russian territory, angering Khrushchev who then promptly ended the meeting.

Question 18

What was the 1966 Chicago campaign? Was it effective?

Answer 18

The civil rights campaign, led by Dr. King, was aimed at drawing national attention to housing and employment discrimination in northern industrial cities. However, instead, it evoked violent opposition from white residents, and failed to attract wide attention or support.

Question 19

How did advances in technology influence the civil rights movement?

Answer 19

Televised images of violence alarmed millions of Americans and created both a new sense of urgency and a growing sense of doubt.

Question 20

What is black power?

Answer 20

Black power has different meanings, but in all its forms, it suggests a shift away from the goals of assimilation and toward increased awareness of racial distinctiveness.

Question 21

Who were the Black Panthers?

Answer 21

The Black Panthers were revolutionary black-power organizations, famously led by Malcolm X.

Question 22

What was the Moscow-Washington hotline?

Answer 22

The Moscow-Washington hotline created a direct link between the U.S. and the USSR. This improved communication between the superpowers and paved the way for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned atmospheric tests.

Question 23

What was the “attrition” strategy?

Answer 23

“Attrition” was a strategy built on the belief that the U.S. could inflict more damage on the enemy than the enemy could absorb. This strategy failed in Vietnam, as the North Vietnamese were willing to commit more soldiers and resources to the conflict than predicted.

Question 24

What was the “pacification” program?

Answer 24

“Pacification” was a strategy to push the Viet Cong from particular regions and then “pacify” those regions by winning the “hearts and minds” of the people.

Question 25

What caused public and political support for the Vietnam War to erode?

Answer 25

Protests, led by university students, drew significant attention to the antiwar movement; journalists helped sustain the movement with frank revelations about the brutality and futility of the war.

Question 26

What was the role of the media in producing opposition to the American war effort in Vietnam?

Answer 26

Through journalism and television, the media exposed political secrets and created public mistrust in the government. Conversely, the media also produced biased information regarding the Vietnam conflict, particularly the Tet Offensive, by portraying the war as “unwinnable”.

Question 27

What characterized the 1960s?

Answer 27

The sixties began with John F. Kennedy, who symbolized the rising idealism of the time; produced a dramatic period of innovation, led by Lyndon B. Johnson, who greatly expanded the size and function of the federal government through the Great Society; and saw the emergence of a sustained and powerful civil rights movement that won a series of crucial victories. While the decade began with the spirit of dynamism and optimism, it ended in division, mistrust, and disillusionment.

Question 28

Why did the U.S. ultimately fail in Vietnam?

Answer 28

The U.S. war effort in Vietnam ultimately failed due to the lack of at-home support, the role of the media, and weak combat tactics.

Question 29

How did America’s youth challenge modern society in the mid-1900s?

Answer 29

The “New Left” and counterculture
- The New Left was a political movement that campaigned for social issues such as civil and political rights, feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, gender roles, drug policy reforms, etc. It largely consisted of American university students.

• Counterculture is an umbrella term that encapsules the ways in which young Americans rebelled against traditional speech and decorum. This was how the image of “hippies” was born, and was also the time when rock music began to gain popularity (ex. The Beatles).

Question 30

What caused so many Latinxs to immigrate to the States in the 60s and 70s?

Answer 30

Large numbers of Mexicans had entered the country during World War II in response to the wartime labor shortage, and many had remained in the cities of the Southwest and the Pacific Coast. Cuban’s also fled to South Florida from the Castro regime.

Question 31

What was the “Stonewall Riot”, and what was its impact?

Answer 31

In 1969, police officers raided a gay nightclub (the Stonewall Inn) and began arresting patrons for being there. The gay community then responded by taunting and attacking the police, and eventually setting the club on fire. This marked the beginning of the gay liberation movement.

Question 32

What was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and when was it repealed?

Answer 32

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a policy that forced people in the military to hide their sexuality, which President Obama repealed in 2010.

Question 33

Who wrote “The Feminine Mystique”, what was it about, and what was its impact?

Answer 33

Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique” after traveling the country to interview women who graduated from Smith College with her. Friedan’s book gave a voice to the Women’s Rights movement that was stirring. The phrase “feminine mystique” was created by Friedan to show the assumptions that women would be fulfilled from their housework, marriage, sexual lives, and children. It was said that women, who were actually feminine, should not have wanted to work, get an education, or have political opinions.

Question 34

When did women begin seeing a change in perspective (regarding women’s rights)? Elaborate on this change.

Answer 34

The 1970s saw great improvement in awareness and perspective. The government extended its affirmative action policies to women, linking sexism with racism as an officially acknowledged social problem. All-male educational institutions like Princeton and Yale began opening their doors to women. These women also became an important part of the workforce. Ronald Reagan named the first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981. Clinton then named the second, THE NOTORIOUS RBG, in 1993. Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice became the first women to serve as secretary of state, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first female major-party nominee for president.

Question 35

Name some legislation passed during Nixon’s presidency to aide the environmental movement.

Answer 35

In 1970, Congress passed and President Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act, which created a new agency—the Environmental Protection Agency—to enforce antipollution standards on businesses and consumers. The Clean Air Act, also passed in 1970, and the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, became additional tools in the government’s arsenal of weapons against environmental degradation.

Question 36

How did environmentalism gain traction in the 1970s?

Answer 36

Environmentalists brought to public attention many long-term dangers and helped create a broad and powerful movement. Rachel Carson’s sensational 1962 book, Silent Spring, which revealed the dangers of pesticides, was based solidly on the ideas of ecologists and did at least as much as Leopold’s work to introduce those ideas to a larger public. Because of these efforts, the ideas of the “food chain,” the “ecosystem,” “biodiversity,” and “endangered species” became common knowledge.

Different administrations displayed varying levels of support for environmental goals, and new environmental problems continued to emerge even as older ones sometimes found solutions. Environmentalism became simultaneously a movement, a set of public policies, and a broad national ideal—and it was the combination of all those aspects that made it a powerful force in American life.

Question 37

Describe Nixon’s interactions with the Chinese government?

Answer 37

Nixon was an avid anti-communist, but finally in 1972, he paid a formal visit to China. It erased much of the deep animosity between the United States and the Chinese communists. Nixon did not yet formally recognize the communist regime, but in 1972 the United States and China began low-level diplomatic relations. The initiatives in China coincided with an effort by the Nixon administration to improve relations with the Soviet Union, an initiative known by the French word détente. In 1971, American and Soviet diplomats produced the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which froze the arsenals of some nuclear missiles (ICBMs) on both sides at present levels. In May of that year, the president traveled to Moscow to sign the agreement. The next year, the Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev, visited Washington.

Question 38

What was the Nixon Doctrine?

Answer 38

In 1969 and 1970, the president described what became known as the Nixon Doctrine, by which the United States would “participate in the defense and development of allies and friends”, but would leave the “basic responsibility” for the future of those “friends” to the nations themselves. In practice, the Nixon Doctrine meant a declining American interest in contributing to Third World development.

Question 39

Explain Nixon’s approach to domestic policy.

Answer 39

Many of Nixon’s domestic policies were a response to what he believed to be the demands of his constituency—the “silent majority” of conservative, mostly middle-class people who, he believed, wanted to reduce federal interference in local affairs. At the same time, he began to reduce or dismantle many of the social programs of the Great Society and the New Frontier. In 1973, he abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity—a centerpiece of the antipoverty program of the Johnson years. Nixon also signed legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency and establishing the most stringent environmental regulations in the nation’s history. He ordered the first affirmative action program for workers on federally funded projects.

Question 40

How did the American economy transform in the late 1900s?

Answer 40

A change in the American economy was the transformation of the nation’s manufacturing sector. Ever since World War II, American industry had enjoyed relatively little competition from the rest of the world. By the end of the 1960s, however, other countries were providing stiff competition to American firms in the sale of automobiles, steel, and many other products, both in world markets and within the United States. Some American corporations failed. Others restructured themselves to become more competitive again in world markets but in the process closed many older plants and eliminated hundreds of thousands of once-lucrative manufacturing jobs. The high-wage, high-employment industrial economy that had been a central fact of American life since the 1940s was gradually disappearing.

Question 41

How did Nixon respond the the changing economy in the 1970s?

Answer 41

Nixon reduced federal spending and raised taxes, producing a modest budget surplus in 1969. But when those policies proved difficult to sustain, Nixon turned increasingly to control of the currency. Placing conservative economists at the head of the Federal Reserve Board, he ensured sharply higher interest rates and a contraction of the money supply. In 1971, Nixon also imposed a ninety-day freeze on all wages and prices at their existing levels. Fearful that the recession would be more damaging than inflation in an election year, the administration reversed itself late in 1971: interest rates were allowed to drop sharply, and government spending increased—producing the largest budget deficit since World War II.

Question 42

How did the Watergate Scandal effect the public perception of the government?

Answer 42

In the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s ignominious departure from office, many Americans wondered whether faith in the presidency, and in the government as a whole, could ever be restored. The administrations of the two presidents who succeeded Nixon did little to answer those questions.

Question 43

What was unique about 1974 and 1975?

Answer 43

Ford had to deal with a confounding economic mix of rising unemployment, high inflation, and slowing economic growth in 1974 and 1975 known as “stagflation.” While it occurred only during this two-year period, it was synonymous with most of the economic troubles of the seventies.

Question 44

What did Carter claim was the “gravest threat to world peace since World War II” ?

Answer 44

On December 27, 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, the mountainous Islamic nation lying between the USSR and Iran. The Soviet Union had been a power in Afghanistan for years and the dominant force since April 1978; a rebellion by radical Islamic guerrilla groups threatened the new Soviet-backed government. Carter angrily imposed a series of economic sanctions on the Russians, canceled American participation in the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow, and announced the withdrawal of SALT II from Senate consideration.

Question 45

What was SALT II?

Answer 45

The new Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty II (SALT II) was an arms control agreement that set limits on the number of long-range missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads of Americans and Soviets. Almost immediately, however, SALT II met with fierce conservative opposition in the United States Senate. The agreement was never ratified.

Question 46

Describe the development of the “New Right”.

Answer 46

Evangelical religion in its modern form became increasingly visible during the early 1950s, when evangelicals such as Billy Graham and Pentecostals such as Oral Roberts began to attract huge national (and international) followings for their energetic revivalism. Alarmed by what they considered the spread of immorality and disorder in American life, evangelicals were concerned about the way a secular culture was intruding into their communities, schools, and families, and the way in which government policies advanced the goals of the women’s movement.

Question 47

What happened in the Tax Revolt?

Answer 47

The Tax Revolt had its public beginnings in 1978, when Howard Jarvis, a conservative activist in California, launched the first successful major citizens’ tax revolt with Proposition 13, a referendum question on the state ballot rolling back property tax rates. Because property taxes were the most important source of funding for schools, Proposition 13 began the slow deterioration of much of the great California education system. Similar anti-tax movements soon began in other states and eventually spread to national politics.

In Proposition 13 and similar initiatives, members of the right succeeded in separating the issue of taxes from the issue of what taxes supported. Instead of attacking popular programs such as Social Security, they attacked taxes themselves and argued that much of the money government raised through taxes was wasted. Virtually no one liked to pay taxes, and as the economy grew weaker and the relative burden of paying taxes grew heavier, that resentment naturally rose.

Question 48

Who made up the Reagan Coalition?

Answer 48

The Reagan coalition included a relatively small but highly influential group of wealthy Americans firmly committed to unfettered capitalism. They believed that the “market” offered the best solutions to most problems, and they shared a deep hostility to most (although not all) government interference in markets.

A second element of the Reagan coalition consisted of a small but influential group of intellectuals commonly known as “neoconservatives,” who gave to the right something it had not had in many years—a firm base among “opinion leaders,” people with access to the most influential public forums of ideas. Neoconservatives were sympathetic to the complaints and demands of capitalists, but their principal concern was to reassert legitimate authority and reaffirm Western democratic, anticommunist values and commitments. They considered themselves soldiers in a battle to “win back the culture”—from the crass, radical ideas that had polluted it.

Question 49

What were supply-side economics?

Answer 49

Supply-side economics operated from the assumption that the woes of the American economy were in large part a result of excessive taxation, which left inadequate capital available to investors to stimulate growth. The solution, therefore, was to reduce taxes, with particularly generous benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals, in order to encourage new investments.

Question 50

What was “deregulation”?

Answer 50

Reagan appointees in the executive branch of government aimed to reduce the role of government in American economic life. Deregulation, an idea many Democrats had begun to embrace in the Carter years, became almost a religion in the Reagan administration.

Question 51

What happened in 1982?

Answer 51

By early 1982, the nation had sunk into a severe recession. The Reagan economic program was not directly to blame for the problems, but neither did it offer a quick solution. But before the recession could do great damage to Reagan, the economy recovered more rapidly and impressively than almost anyone had expected.

Prior years of tight money policies by the Federal Reserve Board had helped lower inflation; perhaps equally important, the Fed had lowered interest rates early in 1983 in response to the recession. A worldwide “energy glut” and the virtual collapse of the OPEC cartel had produced at least a temporary end to the inflationary pressures of spiraling fuel costs. And staggering federal budget deficits were pumping billions of dollars into the flagging economy. As a result, consumer spending and business investment both increased. The stock market rose up from its doldrums of the 1970s and began a sustained and historic boom.

Question 52

What occurred in the mid-1980s?

Answer 52

By the mid-1980s, this growing fiscal crisis had become one of the central issues in American politics. Having entered office promising a balanced budget within four years, Reagan presided over record budget deficits and accumulated more debt in his eight years in office than the American government had accumulated in its entire previous history. Before the 1980s, the highest single-year budget deficit in American history had been $66 billion (in 1976). Throughout the 1980s, the annual budget deficit consistently exceeded $100 billion (and in 1991 peaked at $268 billion). The national debt rose from $907 billion in 1980 to nearly $3.5 trillion by 1991. Much larger deficits—and debt—were soon to come.