Chapter 28- Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth Flashcards
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic program, which included civil rights legislation, antipoverty programs, government subsidy of government care, federal aid to education, consumer protection, and aid to the arts and humanities.
Great Society
1964 at which created a series of programs, including Head Start to prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten and Job Corps and Upward Bound to provide young people with training and employment, aimed at alleviating poverty and spurring economic growth in impoverished areas.
Economic Opportunity Act
A health plan for the elderly passed in 1965 and funded by a surcharge on Social Security payroll taxes.
Medicare
A health plan for the poor passed in 1965 and paid for by general tax revenues and administered by the states.
Medicaid
Law that established the principal of equal pay for equal work. Trade union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the law.
Equal Pay Act
The title of an influential book written in 1963 by Betty Friedan critiquing the ideal whereby women were encouraged to confine themselves to roles within the domestic sphere.
The Feminine Mystique
Commission appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, which issued a 1963 report documenting job and educational discrimination.
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
Women’s civil rights organization formed in 1966. Initially, NOW focused on eliminating gender discrimination in public institutions and the workplace, but by the 1970s it also embraced many of the issues raised by more radical feminists.
National Organization for Women
Resolution passed by Congress in 1964 in the wake of a naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin between the United States and North Vietnam. It gave the president virtually unlimited authority in conducting the Vietnam War. The senate terminated the resolution in 1971 following outrage over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam authorized by President Johnson in 1965; against expectations, it ended up hardening the will of the North Vietnamese to continue fighting.
Operation Rolling Thuder
An organization for social change founded by college students in 1960.
Students for a Democratic Society
A 1962 manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society from its first national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, expressing students’ disillusionment with the nation’s consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor, as well as a rejection of Cold War foreign policy; including the war in Vietnam.
Port Huron Statement
A term applied to radical students of the 1960s and the 1970s, distinguishing their activism from the Old Left- the communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s who tended to focus on economic and labor questions rather than cultural issues.
New Left
The largest student political organization in the country, whose conservative members defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam.
Young Americans for Freedom
Drafted by founding member of the Young Americans for Freedom, this manifesto outlined the group’s principles and inspired young conservatives who would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Sharon Statement
A culture embracing values or lifestyles opposing those of the mainstream culture. Became synonymous with hippies, people who opposed and rejected conventional standards of society and advocated extreme liberalism in their sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles.
counterculture
Major campaign of attacks launched throughout South Vietnam in January 1968 by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. A major turning point in the war, it exposed the credibility gap between official statements and the war’s reality, and it shook American’s confidence in the government.
Tet offensive
Group founded by activist Latinos to protest the Vietnam War.
Chicano Moratorium Committee
A new brand of feminism in the 1960s that attracted primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements who sought to end to the denigration and exploitation of women.
women’s liberation
A law passed by Congress in 1972 that broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, Title IX made women’s athletics a real presence on college campuses.
Title IX
A two-day riot by Stonewall Inn patrons after the police raided the gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1969; the event contributed to the rapid rise of gay liberation movement.
Stonewall Inn
Term derived from the title of a book by Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard Scammon and used by Nixon in a 1969 speech to describe those who supported his positions but did not publicly assert their voices, in contrast to those involved in the antiwar, civil rights, and women’s movements.
silent majority
A new U.S. policy, devised under President Nixon in the early 1970s, of delegating the ground fighting to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. American troop levels dropped and American casualties dropped correspondingly, but the killing in Vietnam continued.
Vietnamization
The 1968 execution by U.S. Army troops of nearly 500 people in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, including a large number of women and children.
My Lai
The easing of conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration, which was achieved by focusing on issues of common concern, such as arms control and trade.
detente
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Ear Warren, which expanded the Constitution’s promise of equality and civil rights. It issued landmark decisions in the areas of civil rights, criminal rights, reproductive freedom, and separation of church and state.
Warren Court
