Section 3 Study Packet

Question 1

How did Americans feel about their new president, Harry S Truman, after Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 2, 1945?

Answer 1

He was a mystery to most Americans who knew little or nothing about him.

Question 2

Why was communism so popular in Europe between 1935 and 1945?

Answer 2

Local communists had been the key opponents to Nazis.

Question 3

The new prosperity that Americans enjoyed after World War II depended largely on

Answer 3

the globalization of the international economy.

Question 4

What prompted the boom in higher education in postwar America?

Answer 4

Government-funded college tuition for veterans.

Question 5

How did conservative citizens’ groups justify their opposition to the expansion of civil rights for African Americans?

Answer 5

They denounced civil rights reform as radical liberalism and communism.

Question 6

Why did Medgar Evers receive death threats?

Answer 6

An African American, he tried to register to vote in Mississippi.

Question 7

How did the G.I. Bill highlight racial inequality in American society?

Answer 7

Southern states had the choice not to offer G.I. Bill benefits at all.

Question 8

Within the United States, the containment policy of Harry S Truman led to

Answer 8

a new red scare.

Question 9

How did World War II change the course of history in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America?

Answer 9

It enabled the rise of revolutionary nationalism in countries that were parts of European colonial empires.

Question 10

Which of the following was the most controversial element of President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal?

Answer 10

A comprehensive federal health insurance program.

Question 11

Where did Time editor Whittaker Chambers hide the evidence of Alger Hiss’s espionage activities?

Answer 11

In a hollowed pumpkin on his Maryland farm.

Question 12

In the years following the war, women were expected to move from their wartime identity as heroic “Rosie the riveters”

Answer 12

back to traditional roles.

Question 13

The most significant civil rights achievement of president Harry S Truman was

Answer 13

the desegregation of the military.

Question 14

Mao Zedong announced the communist People’s Republic of China in

Answer 14

1949

Question 15

What impact did the news of Nazi racism and the Holocaust have on the racial hatred of southern whites in the United States after World War II?

Answer 15

It had very little demonstrable effect on their practice of Jim Crow.

Question 16

Which of the following terms best characterize the 1950s?

Answer 16

affluence and simmering discontent

Question 17

Suburban developments grew in postwar America because of

Answer 17

the assembly-line technologies of tract home construction.

Question 18

What did parents and community leaders in America seem most concerned about during the 1950s?

Answer 18

juvenile delinquency

Question 19

How did “beats” characterize postwar American culture?

Answer 19

They criticized the obsession with materialism and anticommunism.

Question 20

Who was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court when the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas was decided in 1954?

Answer 20

Earl Warren

Question 21

Why did Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and Ralph Abernathy decide to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957?

Answer 21

They wanted to keep the momentum of the Montgomery bus boycott.

Question 22

How did presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower bolster his anticommunist credentials among right-wing Republicans in the 1952 election?

Answer 22

He selected the 38-year-old Senator Richard M. Nixon of California as his running mate.

Question 23

How did the more responsible Republicans respond to the charges of Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin about the communist infiltration of the State Department under President Truman?

Answer 23

They took advantage of his reckless political attacks.

Question 24

The postwar baby boom in the United States is best understood as the result of

Answer 24

a result of rising prosperity.

Question 25

What did the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the case of Shelly v. Kraemer (1948)?

Answer 25

Racial covenants excluding nonwhites from neighborhoods were not legal.

Question 26

What contradictory trend did American women experience in the 1950s?

Answer 26

A growing number of women in the workplace, but a new celebration of traditional families.

Question 27

How did the American media react to Elvis Presley's meteoric rise in 1955?

Answer 27

They described his performances as vulgar and suggestive.

Question 28

What impact did the African American fight against legal segregation in the South have on other nonwhites in the nation?

Answer 28

It inspired a broader soul-searching about inequality for all those seeking freedom.

Question 29

Which political crisis of the 1950s highlighted the global web of connections and commitment that was forged by the demand for oil?

Answer 29

the Suez crisis

Question 30

What brought out an angry mob in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957?

Answer 30

Nine young African American students were attempting to enter Little Rock High school.

Question 31

Which protest movement began with sit-ins at Greensboro and elsewhere in 1960?

Answer 31

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Question 32

What prompted the riots at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962?

Answer 32

Air Force veteran James Meredith wanted to become the first black student.

Question 33

Which of the following was a consequence of the Cuban missile crisis?

Answer 33

Americans and Soviets set up a “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin in case of future emergencies.

Question 34

What effect did the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have on national party politics?

Answer 34

It deepened the racial divide between the major parties.

Question 35

In which of the following cases did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that government and local school boards could not demand prayers in public schools?

Answer 35

Engle v. Vitale (1962)

Question 36

Who was greeted at Kennedy International Airport in New York by a mob of thousands of screaming teenage girls in February 1964?

Answer 36

the Beatles

Question 37

What drove so many young people to the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s?

Answer 37

the slow progress of nonviolent disobedience

Question 38

Why did the Soviets build the Berlin Wall in August of 1961?

Answer 38

Each week more than 4,000 people fled East Berlin for the West.

Question 39

In his first State of the Union address in January 1964, President Johnson declared “unconditional war on

Answer 39

poverty.”

Question 40

Nearly all of the 34 dead at the Watts riots of August 1965 were

Answer 40

black.

Question 41

What drew young men and women to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967?

Answer 41

drugs and music

Question 42

Where did the drug LSD first emerge?

Answer 42

in the U.S. military

Question 43

Which American president signed legislation bringing the Environmental Protection Agency into existence?

Answer 43

Richard M. Nixon

Question 44

The Job Corps in the Great Society of President Lyndon B. Johnson was modeled on

Answer 44

the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal.

Question 45

Why did the American Indian Movement occupy the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay in November 1969?

Answer 45

They demanded that the federal government turn over ownership of the land.

Question 46

Why did the United States government trust Ngo Dinh Diem?

Answer 46

His Roman Catholic faith and his American experience, officials thought, would make him a reliable ally.

Question 47

The Vietnam War led to all of the following, EXCEPT

Answer 47

the defeat of communism in Vietnam.

Question 48

Why did the U.S. Army drop over 1,000,000 pounds of defoliants on the forests of Vietnam?

Answer 48

to rob Vietcong and North Vietnamese fighters of their cover

Question 49

How did U.S. and South Vietnamese intelligence services interpret the massive increase of North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam in December 1967

Answer 49

preparation for an assault on the Marine base of Khe Sanh

Question 50

Which position was the basis for Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy's challenge to Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968?

Answer 50

opposition to the Vietnam War

Question 51

How did President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger conduct their foreign affairs?

Answer 51

in secret

Question 52

On what grounds did the U.S. Supreme Court declare abortion legal in 1973?

Answer 52

Whether to carry out a pregnancy was a woman's private decision.

Question 53

What triggered Operation Rolling Thunder in February 1965?

Answer 53

NLF fighters had attacked the American air base at Pleiku.

Question 54

How did news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam affect the antiwar movement in the United States?

Answer 54

Opposition to the war intensified.

Question 55

How did police respond to the protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 28, 1968?

Answer 55

The police clubbed and tear-gassed the demonstrators outside the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago.

Question 56

As President Richard M. Nixon reduced troop levels in Vietnam in 1969, he also

Answer 56

increased the pace of bombing in South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Question 57

Who was in charge of President Nixon's cover-up of the Watergate scandal?

Answer 57

John Dean

Question 58

Why did President Lyndon Johnson decided to “Americanize” the war in Vietnam in 1964?

Answer 58

He did not want to appear weak or soft.

Question 59

Why did Defense Department advisor Daniel Ellsberg leak copies of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971?

Answer 59

He wanted to broaden opposition to the war.

Question 60

Why did President Richard Nixon fire Archibald Cox?

Answer 60

Cox had asked Judge Sirica to order Nixon to provide him with the tapes.

Question 61

Why did President Jimmy Carter eliminate tax breaks for private schools like the “Christian academies” popular in the South?

Answer 61

They practiced racial discrimination.

Question 62

In foreign affairs, President Jimmy Carter voiced support for peaceful efforts to

Answer 62

replace the white regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.

Question 63

Why did the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein order his army to invade neighboring Iran in September 1980?

Answer 63

He wanted to seize Iran's oil, water, and territory.

Question 64

At the same time that the first Congress under President Ronald Reagan cut federal income taxes by about 25 percent, lawmakers also voted to

Answer 64

increase military spending.

Question 65

Rulings by the Supreme Court in the late 1980s

Answer 65

made it harder to sue for job discrimination on grounds of race, sex, or age.

Question 66

Why did Congress cut off aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in 1982?

Answer 66

Congress learned that the Contras had killed thousands of civilians.

Question 67

What provoked the “English only” movement starting in the 1970s?

Answer 67

The combination of immigration and civil rights resulted in voting materials in foreign languages.

Question 68

What was a major cause for the disproportionate incarceration of black and Latino men from the 1980s onward?

Answer 68

New drug laws made their incarceration more likely.

Question 69

What did the 1986 Tax Reform Act do?

Answer 69

It closed many loopholes and tax shelters.

Question 70

How did Ronald Reagan's Surgeon General C. Everett Koop defy the president's call for less regulation?

Answer 70

He issued a series of reports highlighting the dangers of smoking.

Question 71

Which of the following was the most likely motivation behind Mikhail Gorbachev's radical change of course for the Soviet Union after March 1985?

Answer 71

Socioeconomic problems in the Soviet Union.

Question 72

How did President Gerald Ford anger conservatives early in his presidency?

Answer 72

He appointed former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as vice president.

Question 73

Why were the 16 million added new jobs between 1982 and 1988 not as impressive as the number might suggest?

Answer 73

The new jobs in the service sector paid less than those lost in manufacturing.

Question 74

Upon his election, President Ronald Reagan pledged to

Answer 74

promote a conservative social ethic regarding sex and religion.

Question 75

The first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court was

Answer 75

Sandra Day O'Connor

Question 76

What prompted Congress to update the Clean Air and Water Act?

Answer 76

The pollution caused by the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Question 77

Why had the Reagan and Bush administrations not objected to Iraq's acquisition of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons during the 1980s?

Answer 77

They considered Iraq a useful counterweight to Iran.

Question 78

Which of the following national issues did Bill Clinton tackle most successfully?

Answer 78

Reducing the federal deficit.

Question 79

Why did labor unions strongly oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1993?

Answer 79

They feared it would accelerate jobs moving to Mexico.

Question 80

Why did President Bill Clinton try to pressure the Taliban in Afghanistan to expel Osama Bin Laden in October 2000?

Answer 80

Al Qaeda commandos had blown a hole into the USS Cole in a harbor off the coast of Yemen.

Question 81

Which of the following significant civil rights reforms did President George H. W. Bush sign into law in 1990?

Answer 81

Americans with Disabilities Act

Question 82

During Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings, reports surfaced that he had sexually harassed an African American law professor, Anita Hill, when she worked for him

Answer 82

in the civil rights division of the Justice Department.

Question 83

Why had President Ronald Reagan ignored the drug-running and money-laundering activities of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega?

Answer 83

He had let the CIA use his territory to funnel aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Question 84

What triggered the sharp economic downturn of 1992?

Answer 84

The savings and loans crisis.

Question 85

Like most economists at the time, Bill Clinton expected globalization to

Answer 85

increase wealth as it sped the flow of data and goods.

Question 86

What followed in the wake of Democratic tax increases in 1993?

Answer 86

Employment grew.

Question 87

In the wake of the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Governor Jeb Bush tried to

Answer 87

stop any recount.

Question 88

Why did President Bill Clinton order airstrikes on Al Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan in 1998?

Answer 88

Because of the detonation of two truck bombs in front of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.

Question 89

Where did the global positioning system (GPS) originate?

Answer 89

the military

Question 90

Why did a sizable minority of Americans vote for Ralph Nader in 2000?

Answer 90

They felt that Gore and Bush were identical centrists.