The Conservative Turn Flashcards
Affirmative Action
Policy efforts to promote greater employment opportunities for minorities.
○ The thing they used to have in college before they realized it was racist lol
Busing
The means of transporting students via buses to achieve school integration in the 1970s.
Reverse discrimination
○ Belief that affirmative action programs discriminate against white people.
○ Based
○ Bakke V. California
■ Believed he was unfairly denied due to 16 spots reserved to black students
■ Ruled that race should not be only determinant
Title IX
Part of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 that banned gender discrimination in higher education.
Phyllis Schlafy
○ Led STOP ERA
○ Believed it hurt women’s freedom in traditional role
■ Social security, military draft
Kent State Massacre
National guard opened fire on anti-war protesters - 4 dead
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
1972 talks between President Nixon and Secretary Brezhnev that resulted in the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (or SALT), which limited the quantity of nuclear warheads each nation could possess, and prohibited the development of missile defense systems.
Détente
Period of improving relations between the United States and Communist nations,
particularly China and the Soviet Union, during the Nixon administration.
My Lai massacre
Massacre of 347 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai by Lieutenant William Calley and troops under his command. U.S. army officers covered up the massacre for a year until an investigation uncovered the events. Eventually twenty-five army officers were charged with complicity in the massacre and its cover-up, but only Calley was convicted. He served little time for his crimes.
Pentagon Papers
Informal name for the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam
conflict; leaked to the press by former official Daniel Ellsberg and published in the
New York Times in 1971.
War Powers Act
Law passed in 1973, reflecting growing opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War; required congressional approval before the president sent troops abroad.
Vietnam Syndrome
The belief that the United States should be extremely cautious in deploying its
military forces overseas that emerged after the end of the Vietnam War.
Watergate
Washington office and apartment complex that lent its name to the 1972–1974 scandal of the Nixon administration; when his knowledge of the break-in at the Watergate and subsequent cover-up were revealed, Nixon resigned the presidency under threat of impeachment.
Oil Embargo
Prohibition on trade in oil declared by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, dominated by Middle Eastern producers, in October 1973 in response to U.S. and western European support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The rise in gas prices and fuel shortages resulted in a global economic recession and profoundly affected the American economy.
Stagflation
○ A combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation present during the
1970s.
