APUSH Unit 8 (Period 8) Review: 1945–1980

Topics

8.1 Contextualizing Period 8
After the Handshake · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.1, Contextualizing Period 8, sets up the years 1945 to 1980. World War II left the United States with unbombed cities, close to half of the world's factory output and, until 1949, the only atomic bomb, while the Soviet Union, which lost about 27 million people, held eastern Europe with its army. The American and Soviet soldiers who shook hands at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945 soon became rivals. For 35 years the Cold War shaped foreign policy, politics, schools and where Americans lived, and it gave civil rights activists an argument against Jim Crow.
Summary and transcript
8.2 The Cold War from 1945 to 1980
After the Handshake · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.2, The Cold War from 1945 to 1980, covers the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. George Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram and Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech set the tone for the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the Marshall Plan, and containment became policy. The Berlin airlift, NATO, the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 followed. Nixon's détente produced SALT I in 1972, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Carter Doctrine in 1980 ended it. The two superpowers never went to open war with each other.
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8.3 The Red Scare
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been… · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.3, The Red Scare, is about the hunt for Communists in American government and culture from 1947 to 1954. Soviet spies had operated in the United States, and Truman's 1947 loyalty program, House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Hollywood and the Alger Hiss case turned that danger into fear. In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that Communists held State Department jobs, and Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act over Truman's veto. McCarthy never proved a case, and the Senate condemned him 67 to 22 in December 1954.
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8.4 Economy after 1945
The Crack in the Picture Window · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.4, Economy after 1945, explains the postwar boom and who shared in it. Pent-up demand, the GI Bill of 1944 and builders such as William Levitt helped millions of families buy suburban homes, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 opened more land to suburbs, and by 1960 more than three in five households owned their homes. Cold War defense spending moved jobs and people to the South and West, the Sun Belt. Federal lending rules and local practices kept most suburbs white, and highways often cut through Black city neighborhoods.
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8.5 Culture after 1945
The Crack in the Picture Window · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.5, Culture after 1945, covers how mass media and consumer culture shaped the 1950s and how people pushed back. Television reached almost nine in ten homes by 1960, advertising and credit cards spread the same wants nationwide, and Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 during the Cold War. Teenagers found a voice in rock and roll and in novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, while critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith questioned the consumer boom, and Beat writers and early gay rights groups challenged conformity.
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8.6 Early Steps in the Civil Rights Movement (1940s and 1950s)
All Deliberate Speed · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.6, Early Steps in the Civil Rights Movement (1940s and 1950s), traces how lawyers, soldiers, parents and boycotters challenged segregation. Mendez v. Westminster in 1946 struck down school segregation for Mexican American children in California. Truman ordered equal treatment in the armed forces in 1948. In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days, and Eisenhower sent the Army to Little Rock in 1957, but in the 1963–64 school year only about 1.2 percent of Black students in eleven former Confederate states attended school with white students.
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8.7 America as a World Power
Any Price · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.7, America as a World Power, covers how the United States used military, covert and economic power abroad from 1953 to 1979. Eisenhower relied on nuclear weapons and CIA operations, including the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. After Sputnik in 1957 Congress created NASA, and in his 1961 farewell address Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Kennedy promised to pay any price, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed in 1961, and Carter later made human rights part of foreign policy.
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8.8 The Vietnam War
Dominoes · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.8, The Vietnam War, covers why the United States fought in Vietnam and how the war changed American politics from 1945 to 1975. Containment and the domino theory led Washington to back Ngo Dinh Diem after the 1954 Geneva Accords split Vietnam. After a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The 1968 Tet Offensive turned opinion against the war, and Nixon's Vietnamization and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords ended American combat. South Vietnam fell in 1975. More than 58,000 Americans died, and Congress limited the president's war powers.
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8.9 The Great Society
All the Way · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.9, The Great Society, covers Lyndon Johnson's domestic program from 1964 to 1968. Johnson declared a war on poverty in January 1964. In 1965 Head Start began, and Congress passed Medicare, Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act and an immigration law that ended national-origins quotas. The programs helped cut poverty, but the Vietnam War competed for money, Johnson lost support, and in March 1968 he announced he would not seek reelection. The New Deal answered a collapse, while the Great Society tried to fix poverty that a boom had not.
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8.10 The African American Civil Rights Movement (1960s)
How Long? Not Long · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.10, The African American Civil Rights Movement (1960s), covers the protests and laws of 1960 to 1968. Four students began the Greensboro sit-ins on February 1, 1960, and the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington in August 1963 followed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests, so Black registration in Mississippi rose from under 7 percent to nearly 60 percent in three years. Frustration then fed Black Power and urban riots, and on April 4, 1968, a gunman killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.
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8.11 The Civil Rights Movement Expands
By Right of Discovery · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.11, The Civil Rights Movement Expands, covers how other groups used the tactics and laws of the Black freedom struggle to demand equality between about 1963 and 1975. Women formed the National Organization for Women in 1966 and won Title IX in 1972. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta organized farmworkers, Native activists occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969 and Wounded Knee in 1973, and Asian American students won ethnic studies programs. The Stonewall riots of 1969 helped launch a gay liberation movement. Gains came, but the Equal Rights Amendment fell short of ratification.
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8.12 Youth Culture of the 1960s
The Whole World Is Watching · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.12, Youth Culture of the 1960s, covers the baby boom generation and the movements it built. About 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964, and by 1970 more than twice as many Americans were in college as in 1959. Students formed the New Left through Students for a Democratic Society, which issued the Port Huron Statement in 1962, and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. Opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft grew into mass protest, and a counterculture of rock music, communes and drug use rejected mainstream values.
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8.13 The Environment and Natural Resources from 1968 to 1980
Earthrise · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.13, The Environment and Natural Resources from 1968 to 1980, covers how visible damage and public pressure led to national environmental law and energy policy. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River fire led to the National Environmental Policy Act, and Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 caused shortages and higher prices and pushed Washington toward a national energy policy. In 1980 Carter signed the Superfund law to clean up toxic sites like Love Canal.
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8.14 Society in Transition
Crisis of Confidence · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.14, Society in Transition, covers the loss of trust in government and the rise of conservatism from the 1960s to 1980. The Watergate scandal ended with Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, and stagflation, the oil shocks and the Iran hostage crisis added to the doubt. Trust in Washington fell from about three Americans in four in 1964 to one in four by 1980. Meanwhile the New Right grew through Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, STOP ERA, the Moral Majority and Proposition 13, and Ronald Reagan won 44 states in 1980.
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8.15 Continuity and Change in Period 8
The Time Capsule · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 8.15, Continuity and Change in Period 8, asks how far the years 1945 to 1980 changed American national identity. The Cold War stayed constant, since every president from Truman to Carter promised to contain Soviet power. Inside that frame, the fight for equal rights changed who counted as a full American: by 1965 federal law banned segregation in public places and protected the right to vote, and a new immigration law reshaped the population. Trust in Washington fell from about three Americans in four in 1964 to one in four by 1980, while the suburbs stayed largely white.
Summary and transcript

Key terms

Grand Alliance: Topic 8.1
The wartime partnership of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. A shared enemy held it together, and it began to strain as that enemy collapsed.
Lend-Lease: Topic 8.1
The U.S. program, begun in 1941, that sent Britain, the Soviet Union and other Allies weapons, trucks, fuel and food without payment up front. About $11 billion went to the Soviet Union. Washington ended it in May 1945, days after Germany surrendered.
Superpower: Topic 8.1
A nation strong enough to shape events across the whole world. After 1945 only two qualified, the United States and the Soviet Union, and each read the other's strength as a threat.
Cold War: Topic 8.1
The long rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, from about 1945 to 1991. It was fought through alliances, spies, arms races and proxy wars instead of a direct war between the two superpowers.
GI Bill (1944): Topic 8.1
Federal law giving veterans college and job-training money and government-backed home loans. In practice, local banks, colleges and officials often denied Black veterans the same benefits.
U.S.-Japanese security treaties (1951): Topic 8.1
Treaties that ended the U.S. occupation of Japan but kept American troops on bases there. Japan became a strong ally under the American shield.
United Nations (1945): Topic 8.1
Every member has a seat in the General Assembly. Five permanent members of the Security Council (U.S., USSR, Britain, France, China) each hold a veto.
Bretton Woods system: Topic 8.1
The 1944 plan that created the IMF and the World Bank and fixed exchange rates to the U.S. dollar, which could be exchanged for gold at $35 an ounce.
Satellite states: Topic 8.2
Countries that stay formally independent but are controlled by a great power. After 1945, the Eastern European governments run by Communists loyal to Moscow: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Albania (KC-8.1.I.A).
Collective security: Topic 8.2
Nations acting together, through alliances or an organization like the UN, to stop an aggressor rather than each defending alone (KC-8.1.I.A).
Long Telegram (1946): Topic 8.2
George Kennan's 5,000-word cable from Moscow arguing that Soviet leaders saw the West as an enemy and would back off only when they met firm resistance. It was read across official Washington and became the intellectual basis of containment (KC-8.1.I.A).
Iron Curtain: Topic 8.2
Churchill's phrase (Fulton, March 5, 1946) for the line dividing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from the West: from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic (KC-8.1.I.A).
Truman Doctrine (1947): Topic 8.2
Truman’s pledge to support free peoples resisting takeover by armed minorities or outside pressure. It began as $400 million for Greece and Turkey and set the pattern for containment.
containment: Topic 8.2
The U.S. strategy of stopping the spread of Soviet power and Communism, patiently and without a major war. Critics such as the journalist Walter Lippmann said it would commit America everywhere, even in places that did not matter.
Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, 1948–1952): Topic 8.2
About $13 billion in U.S. aid to rebuild Western Europe’s economies. The logic: hungry, broke countries were more likely to vote Communist, so containment could start with food and factories.
Department of Defense: Topic 8.2
One department to run the Army, Navy and Air Force, with a new independent Air Force. The 1947 act called it the National Military Establishment; it was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949.
National Security Council: Topic 8.2
A council that brings the president and his top foreign-policy and military advisers together to coordinate national security policy.
Central Intelligence Agency: Topic 8.2
A new agency, under the National Security Council, to collect and analyze foreign intelligence in one place.
Berlin blockade (1948–1949): Topic 8.2
Stalin's closing of every road, rail and canal route into West Berlin, from June 1948 to May 1949. It came after the Western powers introduced a new currency, and it was an attempt to force them out of the city.
Berlin airlift (1948–1949): Topic 8.2
The British and American operation that supplied West Berlin entirely by air during the Soviet blockade. It kept two million people fed and warm without a shot fired, and the Soviets ended the blockade in May 1949.
NATO (1949): Topic 8.2
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a defensive alliance of twelve North American and Western European nations. Article 5 says an attack on one is an attack on all. It was the first U.S. peacetime military alliance outside the Americas.
NSC-68 (1950): Topic 8.2
A secret National Security Council report calling for a large, permanent military buildup to contain the USSR. It stayed a proposal until the Korean War made it policy.
38th parallel: Topic 8.2
The line of latitude that split Korea in August 1945. Soviet forces took Japan's surrender north of it and American forces south of it. It became the border between North Korea and South Korea.
UN intervention in Korea: Topic 8.2
Passed while the Soviets boycotted: the Security Council called on members to help South Korea (June 27, 1950) and put the force under an American commander (July 7). Most of its troops were American and South Korean.
Limited war: Topic 8.2
A war fought for a limited goal, here saving South Korea, without using every weapon or widening the fighting into a world war. Truman called Korea a 'police action' to keep it limited.
Civilian control of the military: Topic 8.2
The rule that elected leaders, not generals, make the final decisions about war. The Constitution makes the president commander in chief.
Armistice and the DMZ: Topic 8.2
An armistice stops the fighting without ending the war. The 1953 agreement set up a Demilitarized Zone, a buffer strip along the front line near the 38th parallel. No peace treaty followed.
Massive retaliation: Topic 8.2
Eisenhower's policy, announced by Dulles in January 1954: deter even small Communist moves by threatening an overwhelming, possibly nuclear, reply. It cost less than matching Soviet armies man for man, but it left few choices between backing down and nuclear war.
Brinkmanship: Topic 8.2
Pushing a crisis to the very edge of war so the other side backs down. Dulles, in Life magazine, January 1956: “The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.”
Peaceful coexistence: Topic 8.2
Khrushchev’s line after Stalin: communism and capitalism could compete without war. It fed the “Spirit of Geneva” at the 1955 summit, where Eisenhower also offered “Open Skies,” mutual flights over each other’s territory to check for a surprise attack. Moscow refused.
Warsaw Pact (1955): Topic 8.2
The military alliance the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European states signed in May 1955, days after West Germany joined NATO. It bound them to defend one another, and it was Moscow's answer to NATO.
Berlin Wall (1961–1989): Topic 8.2
The barrier East Germany began building through Berlin on August 13, 1961, to stop its people from fleeing to the West. It started as barbed wire, then grew into concrete, guard towers and a patrolled strip. It stood until 1989.
ExComm: Topic 8.2
The small group of advisers Kennedy gathered in secret to decide how to answer the missiles.
Quarantine: Topic 8.2
Kennedy's word for a naval blockade of offensive weapons headed to Cuba. A blockade counted as an act of war, and Dean Rusk did not want it compared to Stalin's Berlin blockade.
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): Topic 8.2
The thirteen-day standoff in October 1962 after the U.S. found Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was the closest the two superpowers came to nuclear war.
Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963): Topic 8.2
A treaty that banned nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union signed it in Moscow on August 5, 1963. Underground tests were still allowed, which is why it is called limited.
Hotline (1963): Topic 8.2
A direct teletype link between Washington and Moscow, agreed in a memorandum signed June 20, 1963 and working by August 30. Cuba had shown how slowly messages crossed between the two capitals. It was never a red telephone.
Détente: Topic 8.2
A French word for a loosening. In the 1970s the United States and the Soviet Union eased tension through talks, trade and arms control while the rivalry went on. Nixon and Kissinger pursued it with both Moscow and Beijing.
SALT I (1972): Topic 8.2
The first Strategic Arms Limitation agreements. The ABM Treaty let each side keep just two missile-defense sites, and an interim agreement froze the number of land-based long-range missile launchers for five years and capped missile submarines.
Carter Doctrine (1980): Topic 8.2
The policy Carter announced in his 1980 State of the Union address: an outside power's attempt to control the Persian Gulf region would be treated as an assault on vital U.S. interests and met with force if necessary. It answered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Historiography: Topic 8.2
The study of how historians interpret the past, and how those interpretations change over time.
Traditional view: Topic 8.2
Historians who say Stalin started the Cold War by taking over Eastern Europe, while the United States defended the free world.
Revisionist view: Topic 8.2
Historians, rising in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, who argue that U.S. actions also helped start the Cold War.
Soviet espionage: Topic 8.3
Spying for the USSR. Soviet intelligence really did run networks of American sources in the 1930s and 1940s, and later evidence, like the Venona decrypts, confirmed many of the cases.
Communist Party USA: Topic 8.3
The legal American Communist Party, founded in 1919. Most members never spied, but Soviet intelligence recruited some of them.
Sourcing: Topic 8.3
Judging a source by who made it, when, why and for whom (the HIPP questions). A claim nobody can check is weaker evidence than a document you can hold.
Anticommunism: Topic 8.3
Opposition to communism, at home and abroad. After 1945 it shaped foreign policy (containment) and domestic politics (loyalty checks, investigations, blacklists).
Second Red Scare: Topic 8.3
A wave of fear that Communists had infiltrated American government and culture, peaking in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first Red Scare followed World War I.
Executive Order 9835 (1947): Topic 8.3
Truman's loyalty program for federal workers. Agencies investigated employees and applicants, and a Loyalty Review Board heard appeals. The test was 'reasonable grounds' to doubt a worker's loyalty, and informants could stay secret.
Attorney General's list: Topic 8.3
A list of groups the Justice Department called subversive, first issued in December 1947. Belonging to one, or 'sympathetic association' with it, could count against a federal worker.
HUAC: Topic 8.3
The House Un-American Activities Committee. Created in 1938 and made a standing committee in 1945, it investigated suspected Communists in government, unions and Hollywood.
Hollywood Ten: Topic 8.3
Ten men from the film industry who refused to answer HUAC's questions in 1947, citing the First Amendment. Convicted of contempt of Congress, they served six months to a year in prison.
Blacklist: Topic 8.3
An unofficial list of people the studios, and later radio and TV, would not hire over suspected Communist ties. The studios started it by firing the Hollywood Ten and pledging not to hire Communists.
Whittaker Chambers: Topic 8.3
A former Communist and courier for a Soviet spy ring who became a senior editor at Time. In 1948 he told HUAC that Alger Hiss had been part of a Communist group in Washington, and he became the key witness against Hiss.
Alger Hiss: Topic 8.3
A State Department official who advised at the Yalta conference in 1945. Accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948, he denied ever being a Communist and was convicted of perjury in 1950. His case convinced many Americans that Communists had reached high places in the government.
Perjury: Topic 8.3
Lying under oath. The time limit for charging Hiss with spying had run out, so prosecutors charged him with swearing falsely that he had not passed documents to Chambers.
Venona: Topic 8.3
The U.S. Army's secret project, begun in 1943, to decode Soviet intelligence cables. The decrypts stayed secret until 1995. They showed that hundreds of people in the United States had helped Soviet intelligence.
Declaration of Conscience (1950): Topic 8.3
Senator Margaret Chase Smith's speech, signed by six other Republican senators, condemning McCarthy's smear tactics without naming him.
McCarran Internal Security Act (1950): Topic 8.3
Required Communist organizations to register, barred their members from passports and government jobs, and allowed detention of suspected spies and saboteurs in an emergency.
Smith Act (1940): Topic 8.3
Made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the U.S. government by force; used to prosecute Communist Party leaders.
McCarthyism: Topic 8.3
Making public accusations of disloyalty without evidence. The cartoonist Herblock coined the word in March 1950.
Executive Order 10450 (1953): Topic 8.3
Eisenhower's security order for federal workers. It replaced Truman's loyalty program with a broader test of whether keeping a worker was consistent with national security, and it named “sexual perversion” among the grounds for firing.
Lavender Scare: Topic 8.3
The purge of gay men and lesbians from federal jobs, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting for decades, on the claim that they were security risks. Historians estimate thousands lost their jobs.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: Topic 8.3
A New York couple convicted in 1951 of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The charge was conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason. They were executed on June 19, 1953.
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: Topic 8.3
A standing Senate panel that looks into waste, fraud and wrongdoing in the government. McCarthy chaired it in 1953–54 and ran his hearings on Communists in government through it.
See It Now (1954): Topic 8.3
Edward R. Murrow’s CBS news program. Its March 9, 1954 report on McCarthy ran his own speeches and film clips and helped turn public opinion against him.
Army–McCarthy hearings (1954): Topic 8.3
Senate hearings, April 22 to June 17, 1954, on the Army’s charges against McCarthy and Cohn and McCarthy’s charges against the Army. An estimated 20 million watched on television, and the hearings hurt his standing.
Censure: Topic 8.3
A formal vote of disapproval of a member of Congress. The Senate’s 1954 resolution used the word “condemned,” and McCarthy kept his seat until he died.
Kent v. Dulles (1958): Topic 8.3
The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that, without a clear law from Congress, the State Department could not deny passports over a person's beliefs or associations. Robeson got his passport back after it.
Executive Order 12968 (1995): Topic 8.3
President Clinton's order on access to classified information. It barred discrimination in security clearances on the basis of race, religion, sex, disability and, for the first time, sexual orientation.
Civil liberties: Topic 8.3
Individual freedoms that protect people from government power: speech, belief, association, due process. The Red Scare made Americans ask how far government could go to fight Communism and still protect them.
Kitchen Debate (1959): Topic 8.4
The unscripted argument between Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, July 24, 1959. Each defended his country's economic system by pointing to the ordinary home.
Postwar economic boom: Topic 8.4
Rapid U.S. growth after World War II. New jobs, rising incomes, cheap mortgages and heavy government spending put homes, cars and appliances within reach of millions of families.
Pent-up demand: Topic 8.4
Spending held back by the Depression, wartime rationing and a shortage of goods to buy. Once the war ended it poured out into cars, appliances and houses and helped drive the postwar boom.
Postwar housing shortage: Topic 8.4
The gap between the number of American families and the number of homes for them after 1945. Builders had built few houses during the Depression and almost none during the war, while veterans married and started families.
Baby boom: Topic 8.4
The surge in U.S. births between 1946 and 1964, peaking at 4.3 million in 1957. It raised demand for houses, schools and consumer goods for decades.
Levittown: Topic 8.4
A mass-produced suburb of more than 17,000 houses on Long Island, built from 1947 to 1951 by Levitt & Sons. It became the model for postwar suburbs across the country.
Restrictive covenant: Topic 8.4
A clause in a deed or lease that bars selling or renting to certain groups. Courts stopped enforcing racial covenants after Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).
Federal Housing Administration (FHA): Topic 8.4
The New Deal agency, created in 1934, that insured home mortgages. It made long loans with small down payments normal, and its rules steered that money to white neighborhoods.
Redlining: Topic 8.4
Denying mortgages and insurance to people in certain neighborhoods, often Black or immigrant ones, because of where they lived. The name comes from the red zones on 1930s federal maps.
Treaty of Detroit (1950): Topic 8.4
The five-year contract between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. The union promised labor peace; workers got rising wages, pensions and health insurance. Other factory unions won similar deals.
Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956): Topic 8.4
Created the Interstate Highway System: 41,000 miles of road, with Washington paying 90 percent. Official name: the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
Franchise: Topic 8.4
A business deal that lets local owners use a company's name and methods. Franchising spread identical restaurants, motels and stores across the country, a big part of the new national mass culture.
White flight: Topic 8.4
The movement of white families from cities to suburbs, often as Black families moved in. Highways and cheap FHA loans made the move easy, and older cities lost tax money.
Defense spending: Topic 8.4
Federal money spent on the military and on the companies that supply it. During the Cold War much of it flowed to the South and West, and it helped move industry, people and political power there.
Second Great Migration: Topic 8.4
The move of about five million Black Southerners to cities in the North and West, from about 1940 to 1970. War-industry and factory jobs drew them, and Jim Crow segregation and violence pushed them out. It followed a first wave that began around World War I.
Reapportionment: Topic 8.4
After each census, the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the states by population. Electoral votes follow the seats, so a growing state gains power in presidential elections too.
Sun Belt: Topic 8.4
The fast-growing states of the South and Southwest, from Florida to California. After 1945, defense money, air conditioning and cheap land drew people and jobs there, and political power followed.
Mass culture: Topic 8.5
Entertainment, advertising and products shared by the whole country at once, through national networks, chains and brands.
“Under God”: Topic 8.5
Two words Congress added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, as the Cold War set the U.S. against the officially atheist Soviet Union.
Contextualization: Topic 8.5
Explaining a source by the events of its time. Eisenhower said this in the middle of the Cold War, so read it with that in mind.
Consumer culture: Topic 8.5
A way of life shaped by buying things. In the 1950s, national ads, chain stores and credit cards taught millions of people to want the same goods.
The Catcher in the Rye (1951): Topic 8.5
J. D. Salinger's novel, told by a troubled sixteen-year-old who thinks the adult world is phony. It became a classic challenge to the conformity of 1950s culture.
rock and roll: Topic 8.5
A 1950s style of popular music that blended African American rhythm and blues with white country music. Teenagers bought it on 45 rpm records and heard it on the radio and television.
Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956): Topic 8.5
A 381-day protest in which Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride segregated city buses. It made Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure and ended when the courts struck down bus segregation.
Beat Generation: Topic 8.5
Writers and poets of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who rejected conformity, careers and consumer comfort for spontaneity, travel and personal freedom.
Conformity: Topic 8.5
Acting, dressing and thinking like everyone around you. Critics in the 1950s said big corporations, suburbs and mass media pushed Americans to fit in instead of thinking for themselves.
The Affluent Society (1958): Topic 8.5
John Kenneth Galbraith's book arguing that a rich America spent too much on private goods and too little on schools, roads and cities. His phrase: private opulence and public squalor.
Mattachine Society: Topic 8.5
One of the first gay rights groups in the United States, started in Los Angeles in 1950. Its 1951 statement of purpose set out three goals: to unify gay Americans, to educate the public and to lead.
ONE, Inc. v. Olesen (1958): Topic 8.5
A one-paragraph Supreme Court ruling that overturned lower courts which had called a gay magazine obscene. ONE could be mailed to its readers.
Suburbanization: Topic 8.5
The move of families from cities to new suburbs after 1945. Federally backed mortgages, cars and highways drove it. Most families who moved were white, because lenders and builders shut out many Black families.
Racial wealth gap: Topic 8.5
The gap between the typical wealth of white and Black families. A house is most families' biggest asset, and federal mortgage rules after 1934 steered loans away from many Black families and neighborhoods.
Baby boomers: Topic 8.5
Americans born between 1946 and 1964. They grew up in the suburbs and the television age, and the oldest of them came of age in the 1960s.
Mendez v. Westminster (1946): Topic 8.6
A 1946 federal ruling that four Orange County, California, school districts could not send Mexican American children to separate schools. The Ninth Circuit upheld it in 1947. It came eight years before Brown v. Board of Education.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Topic 8.6
The Supreme Court decision that let states require "separate but equal" public facilities. It protected segregation, schools included, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Amicus curiae brief: Topic 8.6
Latin for "friend of the court." A brief filed by someone who is not a party to the case but has a stake in the outcome. Several civil rights groups, including the NAACP, filed them in the Mendez appeal.
Equal Protection Clause (1868): Topic 8.6
Part of the Fourteenth Amendment: no state may "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The cases that follow argue about what it requires.
President's Committee on Civil Rights (1946): Topic 8.6
Truman created it by executive order on December 5, 1946, bypassing Southern Democrats who controlled key committees in Congress. Its fifteen members studied discrimination and recommended federal action. Its 1947 report was To Secure These Rights.
To Secure These Rights (1947): Topic 8.6
The President's Committee on Civil Rights' 1947 report. It called for a federal anti-lynching law, an end to poll taxes, and desegregation of the armed forces, and it argued that discrimination at home hurt the United States in the Cold War. The Justice Department made the same argument in its 1952 brief in Brown.
Jackie Robinson: Topic 8.6
Broke Major League Baseball's color line on April 15, 1947, playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Showed that an integrated team could win and sell tickets, more than a year before Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated.
Executive Order 9981 (1948): Topic 8.6
Truman's July 26, 1948 order declaring equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed services. He issued it without Congress, and it set up a committee to carry it out. The Army resisted until the Korean War.
desegregation of the armed forces: Topic 8.6
Ending separate Black and white units in the U.S. military. Ordered in 1948, but achieved in practice mostly during the Korean War (1950–53), when the Army needed replacements. One of the first federal steps against Jim Crow.
Sweatt v. Painter (1950): Topic 8.6
Supreme Court ruling that Texas's separate law school for Black students was not equal, because it lacked the reputation, alumni and tradition of the white school. Decided the same day as McLaurin.
Thurgood Marshall: Topic 8.6
NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer who argued Sweatt, Briggs and Brown. A student of Charles Hamilton Houston, he became the first Black Supreme Court justice in 1967.
Briggs v. Elliott: Topic 8.6
South Carolina school case brought by twenty Black parents. In 1951 a federal court ruled 2–1 to equalize the schools but keep them separate. It became one of the five Brown cases.
NAACP: Topic 8.6
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909. Its lawyers planned and argued the school desegregation cases.
Hernandez v. Texas (1954): Topic 8.6
A unanimous Supreme Court decision, two weeks before Brown. Chief Justice Warren wrote that equal protection covers Mexican Americans as a class, even though Texas called them white. The Court reversed a conviction from a jury that had excluded them.
Earl Warren: Topic 8.6
Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and, before that, governor of California. He wrote the unanimous opinions in Hernandez v. Texas and Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954): Topic 8.6
A unanimous Supreme Court decision holding that state-required segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, because separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. It rejected 'separate but equal' in public education.
Bolling v. Sharpe (1954): Topic 8.6
Decided the same day as Brown. The District of Columbia is federal and the Fourteenth Amendment applies to states, so the Court held that segregated D.C. schools violated the Fifth Amendment's due process clause.
Brown v. Board of Education II (1955): Topic 8.6
The Court's follow-up to Brown. It sent the school cases back to local federal judges and ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," with no deadline.
All deliberate speed: Topic 8.6
The Brown II phrase for how fast schools had to desegregate. It set no date, so local judges could allow delay, and many Southern officials read it as permission to wait.
White Citizens' Councils: Topic 8.6
Local groups of white business and civic leaders, begun in Mississippi in 1954, that fought desegregation with economic pressure: firing, evicting, and refusing credit to Black parents and NAACP members.
Martin Luther King Jr.: Topic 8.6
A Baptist minister who became the best-known leader of the civil rights movement. At 26 he was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, and he led the boycott.
Nonviolent movement: Topic 8.6
A strategy of protest that refuses to answer force with force. Its tools were boycotts, marches, sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience. King drew on Christian teaching and on Gandhi’s example.
Browder v. Gayle (1956): Topic 8.6
A federal case brought by four Black women that struck down bus segregation in Montgomery. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling in November 1956. It applied the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education beyond schools.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): Topic 8.6
A civil rights organization of Black ministers and churches, formed in 1957 to coordinate nonviolent protest across the South. King was its first president.
Southern Manifesto (1956): Topic 8.6
A March 1956 statement by Southern members of Congress calling Brown “a clear abuse of judicial power” and urging resistance by lawful means. It had no force of law.
Filibuster: Topic 8.6
A Senate tactic of unlimited debate used to delay or block a vote. Thurmond’s speech did not stop the 1957 bill; it passed 60 to 15.
Civil Rights Act of 1957: Topic 8.6
The first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction. It created the Civil Rights Commission and let the Justice Department sue to protect voting. A jury-trial compromise weakened enforcement.
Civil Rights Commission: Topic 8.6
A bipartisan federal body created by the 1957 Act to investigate voting-rights complaints and report. It could investigate; it could not enforce.
Little Rock crisis (1957): Topic 8.6
Governor Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students from Central High. After a federal court order, Eisenhower issued Proclamation 3204 (Sept. 23) and Executive Order 10730 (Sept. 24), federalized the Guard and sent the 101st Airborne.
Massive resistance: Topic 8.6
The Southern white campaign to defeat Brown by every available means: state laws, cut-off funds, private schools for white students, and closed public schools. Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd is usually credited with the phrase.
Second Reconstruction: Topic 8.6
A name many historians give to the civil rights era. Like the first Reconstruction, it fought to make the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection real. Like the first, it met years of resistance.
Sit-in movement (1960): Topic 8.6
A tactic of nonviolent direct action: Black students sat at whites-only lunch counters and refused to leave until they were served. It began in Greensboro, North Carolina, and spread across the South within weeks.
Military-industrial complex: Topic 8.7
Eisenhower's 1961 name for the partnership between a permanent military and the industries that build its weapons. He warned that together they could gain “unwarranted influence” over government and policy.
New Look (1953): Topic 8.7
Eisenhower's defense policy. It relied on nuclear weapons and air power, which cost less than large armies, backed by the threat of 'massive retaliation.'
covert action: Topic 8.7
Secret operations to change another country's government or policies, planned so the United States could deny them.
nationalization: Topic 8.7
When a government takes over a privately owned company or industry. Iran took over the oil company that Britain owned.
United Fruit Company: Topic 8.7
An American company that grew and shipped bananas and was the largest landowner in Guatemala. Its land was the biggest target of the 1952 land reform.
Sputnik (1957): Topic 8.7
The first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. Americans took it as proof that Soviet rockets could reach the United States, and it set off the space race.
NASA (1958): Topic 8.7
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a civilian space agency Congress created in 1958. Military missile programs stayed with the armed forces.
National Defense Education Act (1958): Topic 8.7
About $1 billion for science, math and foreign-language teaching and for student loans. Congress passed it because Sputnik made Americans fear they were falling behind the Soviets.
Missile gap (1957–1961): Topic 8.7
The claim, widely made after Sputnik and used by Kennedy in the 1960 campaign, that the Soviets had pulled ahead of the United States in long-range missiles. In fact the United States was far ahead.
Military-industrial complex (1961): Topic 8.7
Eisenhower's name for the alliance between a permanent military and the industries that supply it. In his farewell address he warned it could gain “unwarranted influence” over government policy.
Decolonization: Topic 8.7
The collapse of European colonial empires after World War II. About three dozen colonies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East became independent nations between 1947 and 1960.
Third World: Topic 8.7
A Cold War label, coined in France in 1952, for the mostly poorer nations outside both the Western and the Communist blocs. Many were newly independent.
Nonalignment: Topic 8.7
A policy of joining neither Cold War bloc. India, Egypt and Indonesia took aid from both sides and chose neither. The Non-Aligned Movement formed at Belgrade in 1961.
Eisenhower Doctrine: Topic 8.7
President Eisenhower’s January 1957 pledge to give aid, and to use U.S. armed forces if asked, to help Middle Eastern nations resist Communist aggression. It was aimed at Soviet influence after Suez.
Embargo: Topic 8.7
A ban on trade with a country, used to pressure it. On October 19, 1960, the United States banned most exports to Cuba.
Bay of Pigs invasion (1961): Topic 8.7
A failed invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. About 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed and were beaten in three days. It embarrassed the new president.
Alliance for Progress (1961): Topic 8.7
A U.S.-led aid program for Latin America, announced in March 1961: money for development, housing, schools and land reform. Its charter aimed for $20 billion in outside aid over ten years, with a major part from the United States.
Peace Corps (1961): Topic 8.7
A U.S. government program that sent American volunteers to teach and work in developing countries. Kennedy created it by executive order on March 1, 1961.
Cold War in Latin America (KC-8.1.I.E, in plain words): Topic 8.7
The United States backed non-Communist governments in Latin America whether or not they were democracies.
Flexible response (1961): Topic 8.7
Kennedy’s defense strategy: build up conventional and special forces so a president had choices short of nuclear war. It replaced Eisenhower’s reliance on massive retaliation.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD): Topic 8.7
The idea that each side keeps enough weapons to destroy the other even after being attacked first, so neither dares to start a war. In the late 1960s a critic, Donald Brennan, gave it the acronym MAD, to mock it.
Anti-nuclear movement (1957–): Topic 8.7
Citizens’ groups such as SANE (1957) and Women Strike for Peace (1961) that campaigned against nuclear tests and the arms race, often pointing to fallout in children’s milk and bones.
Plurality: Topic 8.7
The most votes, but less than half. Allende won 36.6 percent in a three-way race, so Chile’s Congress had to confirm him. It did, 153 to 35, on October 24, 1970.
Church Committee (1975–76): Topic 8.7
The Senate investigation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. It looked at plots against foreign leaders and at spying on Americans, and it made many secret files public.
Proxy war: Topic 8.7
A war between local sides in which bigger powers pay for weapons or send troops instead of fighting each other directly. In Angola, the Soviet Union and Cuba backed one movement. The United States, Zaire and South Africa backed the other two.
Clark Amendment (1976): Topic 8.7
A 1976 law that banned covert U.S. aid to groups fighting in Angola. It showed how far Congress had moved, after Vietnam and Watergate, to limit what a president could do in secret. Congress repealed it in 1985.
Human rights diplomacy: Topic 8.7
A foreign policy that weighs how a government treats its own people when deciding whether to give it aid and support. Carter made it a stated goal of U.S. policy in 1977.
Panama Canal treaties (1977): Topic 8.7
Two treaties Carter signed in 1977 returning the Panama Canal to Panama. The Senate approved each in 1978, 68 to 32, one vote more than the two-thirds needed. Panama took control at the end of 1999.
Camp David Accords (1978): Topic 8.7
Agreements Egypt and Israel reached at Camp David in September 1978, with Carter as mediator. They led to the 1979 peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab country.
Democratic Republic of Vietnam: Topic 8.8
The state proclaimed in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, with Hồ Chí Minh at its head. He opened its declaration with a line from the American Declaration of Independence.
Viet Minh: Topic 8.8
The League for the Independence of Vietnam (Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh), led by Hồ Chí Minh. It fought Japan in 1945 and France after that. It was nationalist and Communist.
Self-determination: Topic 8.8
The right of a people to choose their own government. The Atlantic Charter (August 1941) and the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, both stated it. Hồ Chí Minh asked the United States to apply it to Vietnam.
Geneva Accords (1954): Topic 8.8
The July 1954 agreements that ended France’s war in Indochina. They divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, called the line “provisional,” and promised nationwide elections in July 1956. The U.S. and Saigon did not endorse the final declaration.
Ngô Đình Diệm (1901–1963): Topic 8.8
South Vietnam’s leader from 1954 to 1963. A Catholic, anti-Communist nationalist, he got U.S. money, arms and advisers. His government favored Catholics and jailed opponents, and many Buddhists and peasants turned against it.
SEATO (1954): Topic 8.8
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, signed at Manila in September 1954. Modeled on NATO: the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan promised to act together against aggression in the region. A protocol covered South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which were not members. Later presidents cited it.
Military advisers: Topic 8.8
American officers and sergeants sent to train South Vietnam’s army and to go into the field with it. Washington called them advisers, not combat troops. Kennedy’s buildup grew their number and added helicopter and support units.
Viet Cong (National Liberation Front): Topic 8.8
The Communist-led guerrilla movement in South Vietnam, organized as the National Liberation Front in December 1960. Most early fighters were southerners. Hanoi backed them with orders, supplies and, later, soldiers.
Strategic hamlets: Topic 8.8
A 1962–63 program to move South Vietnam’s rural families into fenced, guarded villages, cutting the guerrillas off from the peasants. Many families were moved off their ancestors’ land against their will. The program fell apart after Diem did.
covert operation: Topic 8.8
A government action carried out in secret so its role can be denied. The United States directed these raids and kept its part quiet.
Commander in Chief: Topic 8.8
The President's constitutional role as head of the armed forces (Article II, Section 2). Johnson ordered the strikes on that authority before Congress voted.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964): Topic 8.8
An August 1964 law approving the President's use of “all necessary measures” to repel armed attack. Johnson later treated it as authority to fight in Vietnam without a declaration of war.
declaration of war: Topic 8.8
Under Article I, Section 8, only Congress can declare war. Congress never declared war on North Vietnam; the Johnson administration treated this resolution as a substitute.
Tet Offensive: Topic 8.8
A surprise attack by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces on cities and bases all over South Vietnam, launched during the lunar new year truce in January 1968. Allied troops beat it back, but it shattered Americans' belief that the war was almost won.
The living-room war: Topic 8.8
Critic Michael Arlen's 1966 name for Vietnam on TV news: Americans watched the war from their sofas every night. Historians still argue over how much that changed minds.
New Hampshire primary (1968): Topic 8.8
The first primary of the 1968 election. Antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy won about 42% against a write-in campaign for President Johnson's roughly 49%, a shock for a sitting president. Robert Kennedy entered the race soon after.
Johnson ends escalation (1968): Topic 8.8
After Tet, the Joint Chiefs asked for about 200,000 more troops. Instead, on March 31, 1968, Johnson limited the bombing of North Vietnam, offered to negotiate, and announced he would not run again.
Vietnamization: Topic 8.8
Nixon's plan to train and equip South Vietnam's army to fight the ground war while U.S. troops withdrew. American air power and money kept flowing. The goal: end America's combat role without abandoning an ally.
Nixon Doctrine: Topic 8.8
Announced on Guam, July 25, 1969: the United States would keep its treaty commitments and help its Asian allies with money and arms, but expected them to supply the troops for their own defense.
Silent majority: Topic 8.8
Nixon's name for ordinary Americans who, he said, backed his Vietnam policy but did not join the protests. He used it in a televised speech on November 3, 1969, to answer the antiwar movement.
My Lai massacre: Topic 8.8
The killing of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers by U.S. Army soldiers on March 16, 1968. The story reached the public in November 1969 and deepened doubts about how the war was fought. Only one soldier, Lt. William Calley, was convicted.
Kent State: Topic 8.8
On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers fired on students protesting the Cambodian invasion at Kent State University. Four students died and nine were wounded. Campuses across the country closed or went on strike.
Pentagon Papers: Topic 8.8
The Defense Department's secret history of U.S. decisions in Vietnam, 1945–1967, officially the Report of the OSD Vietnam Task Force. Daniel Ellsberg copied it and gave it to newspapers in 1971.
Prior restraint: Topic 8.8
A government order that blocks speech or publication before it happens. Under the First Amendment, courts presume such an order is unconstitutional.
New York Times Co. v. United States (1971): Topic 8.8
The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government could not stop newspapers from printing the Pentagon Papers. Prior restraint is presumed unconstitutional, and the government had not met its heavy burden.
Plumbers: Topic 8.8
A secret White House unit formed in July 1971 to stop leaks after the Pentagon Papers. Two of its members, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, later planned the Watergate break-in.
Operation Linebacker II (1972): Topic 8.8
Eleven days of B-52 and fighter raids on Hanoi and Haiphong, December 18–29, 1972, with a pause on Christmas Day. Nixon ordered them to press North Vietnam back to the table. Fifteen B-52s were shot down. Historians still argue over how much it changed the final terms.
Paris Peace Accords (1973): Topic 8.8
The January 27, 1973 agreement signed by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government. It set a cease-fire, U.S. withdrawal within 60 days and the return of prisoners. It did not require North Vietnamese troops already in the South to leave.
Case–Church Amendment (1973): Topic 8.8
A 1973 measure by Senators Clifford Case (R-N.J.) and Frank Church (D-Idaho) that barred spending on U.S. combat in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia unless Congress approved it. The funding cutoff took effect August 15, 1973. It is Congress using its power of the purse.
War Powers Resolution (1973): Topic 8.8
A law requiring the president to report to Congress within 48 hours of sending troops into combat and to withdraw them within 60 days, plus up to 30 more to pull out safely, unless Congress approves. Presidents of both parties have questioned whether it is constitutional.
Domino theory: Topic 8.8
Eisenhower's 1954 image of the Cold War: if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would topple after it, one by one. It became a main reason for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Credibility gap: Topic 8.8
The distance between what officials said about the war in public and what they knew in private. As it grew, Americans stopped believing what Washington told them.
Appalachia: Topic 8.9
The mountain region of the eastern United States, running from southern New York down into Alabama. In the early 1960s its coal counties, in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia especially, had some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
Poverty rate: Topic 8.9
The share of people whose family cash income falls below a set federal line. That line was built in the mid-1960s, so the Census worked out 1964's rate afterward, and the official rate counts cash income, not hospital bills or food aid.
War on Poverty: Topic 8.9
Johnson's name for the federal anti-poverty effort he declared in his January 1964 State of the Union. The Economic Opportunity Act, signed that August, created an Office of Economic Opportunity to run programs such as Job Corps and Community Action.
The Other America (1962): Topic 8.9
Michael Harrington's book arguing that about 40 million Americans lived in poverty that the rest of the country rarely saw, in the middle of postwar prosperity. It helped make poverty a national political problem.
Poverty line: Topic 8.9
The income below which a family counts as poor. Mollie Orshansky built it from the cost of a minimal food budget times three. The Census Bureau still uses it, adjusted each year for inflation.
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Title I): Topic 8.9
The 1965 law that gave federal money to public schools. Title I sent the most help to districts with many low-income students. It was the first large federal aid program for K–12 schools.
Head Start: Topic 8.9
A federal preschool program for children from low-income families, begun in the summer of 1965 under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. It was a program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, not a separate law.
Equality of opportunity vs. equality of result: Topic 8.9
Equality of opportunity means the same legal rights and the same chance at the start. Equality of result means people end up in similar places. At Howard, Johnson said opening the gates was not enough. Critics feared the government would judge by outcomes.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): Topic 8.9
The cabinet department Congress created in September 1965 to run federal housing and city programs. Its first secretary, Robert C. Weaver, was the first Black member of a president's cabinet.
Higher Education Act of 1965: Topic 8.9
The 1965 law that created federal scholarships, low-interest student loans and work-study money to help low- and middle-income students go to college.
Medicare: Topic 8.9
Health insurance for people 65 and older, passed in 1965 as an amendment to Social Security. Part A pays hospital bills through a payroll tax. That plan came from the King–Anderson bill. Part B is voluntary insurance for doctor bills, from John Byrnes's Bettercare proposal. In 1966 a worker paid about $1.50 a month toward Part A, and the employer paid the same.
Medicaid: Topic 8.9
A program in the same 1965 law, for people with very low incomes, including children and people with disabilities. States run it. Washington shares the cost. It grew out of the Kerr–Mills program of 1960 and out of the doctors' Eldercare plan, a means test run by the states.
Social Security Amendments of 1965: Topic 8.9
Public Law 89-97, signed July 30, 1965. One law created Medicare and Medicaid and raised Social Security cash benefits.
Title VI: Topic 8.9
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars race discrimination in any program that receives federal money. When Medicare payments began on July 1, 1966, a hospital had to follow that rule to be paid.
National-origins quotas: Topic 8.9
Caps set by the Immigration Act of 1924 and kept by the McCarran–Walter Act (1952). Large shares of the visas went to Northern and Western Europe. Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa got small ones. The number turned on where a person was from, not on a skill or a relative.
Hart–Celler Act: Topic 8.9
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Public Law 89-236, signed October 3, 1965. It ended national-origins quotas. People were admitted by family ties, job skills, and refugee status, under hemisphere ceilings. Also called the Immigration Act of 1965.
Family reunification: Topic 8.9
The 1965 order of visas: relatives of citizens and of legal residents came before workers, and refugees had a share too. Immediate relatives of citizens stood outside the numerical ceiling. That rule, more than the signing day, is what later changed who came.
Bracero program: Topic 8.9
A 1942–1964 program that admitted Mexican farmworkers on temporary contracts. Congress let it end on December 31, 1964. A legal way in closed. Entries without papers grew.
Refugee: Topic 8.9
A person admitted because of persecution, or because they were leaving a communist state. The 1965 law gave refugees one preference inside the ceiling. Cubans, and later people from Indochina, also came through laws written just for them.
Office of Economic Opportunity: Topic 8.9
The agency the 1964 poverty act set up to run Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, and Community Action. Over about ten years it disbursed $12.5 billion. One year of the Vietnam War, fiscal 1968, cost about twice that.
Guns and butter: Topic 8.9
Journalists' name for funding a war and domestic programs at the same time. Johnson tried not to make the country choose. Prices were already rising. In June 1968 Congress passed a 10 percent tax surcharge.
Community Action Program: Topic 8.9
Local agencies, paid by the poverty office, that were supposed to let the people they served help run the programs. Mayors fought that. Edith Green's 1967 amendment let a state or a city take an agency over.
Poor People's Campaign: Topic 8.9
SCLC's 1968 plan to bring poor people to Washington to demand work, income, and a decent place to live. Ralph Abernathy led it after King was killed. The camp on the Mall, Resurrection City, stood from May 13 until police cleared it on June 24.
Resurrection City: Topic 8.9
The plywood camp the Poor People's Campaign built on the National Mall, May 13 to June 24, 1968. It rained. A few thousand people lived there. On June 24 the police cleared what was left.
Food Stamp Act: Topic 8.9
The 1964 law that let low-income households buy food with stamps. Still law. In 2008 the program was renamed SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Jim Crow: Topic 8.10
The system of laws and customs that kept Black and white Americans apart across the South, in schools, buses, restaurants and other public places, and denied Black citizens equal treatment.
Public accommodations: Topic 8.10
Businesses open to the public, such as stores, restaurants and hotels. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal law did not stop most owners from refusing Black customers.
Civil rights movement: Topic 8.10
The mass campaign, mostly from the 1950s to the late 1960s, to end legal segregation and win equal rights for Black Americans, through lawsuits, marches, boycotts and sit-ins.
Sit-in: Topic 8.10
A protest in which people take seats in a segregated business and refuse to leave until they are served. The Greensboro sit-ins began on February 1, 1960, and spread to more than 30 communities in seven states by the end of that month.
Civil disobedience: Topic 8.10
Openly breaking a law or rule you believe is unjust, without violence, and accepting the punishment. Sit-in students who stayed after being told to leave took the arrests that followed.
Jail, no bail: Topic 8.10
A protest tactic used by CORE and SNCC: arrested demonstrators refuse to pay bail or a fine and serve their full sentence, turning the punishment into part of the protest.
SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee): Topic 8.10
Founded in 1960 by student sit-in leaders, independent of the older civil rights groups. Its young organizers later led voter-registration drives in the Deep South.
Boynton v. Virginia (1960): Topic 8.10
Supreme Court decision holding that segregation in bus terminals serving interstate travelers violated the federal Interstate Commerce Act. Southern terminals mostly kept their signs anyway.
Freedom Rides (1961): Topic 8.10
Interracial bus trips through the South that tested the Supreme Court’s ban on segregated interstate bus terminals. CORE began them in May 1961; hundreds more joined.
Bailey v. Patterson (1962): Topic 8.10
Supreme Court decision declaring that no state may require racial segregation of interstate or intrastate transportation facilities. The Court called the point settled beyond question.
Legal challenges: Topic 8.10
Lawsuits used to force governments to end segregation. Constance Baker Motley argued ten cases before the Supreme Court and won nine; in 1966 she became the first Black woman federal judge.
Nonviolent direct action: Topic 8.10
Peaceful public protest, such as marches and sit-ins, that confronts an unjust system head-on. Activists accept arrest so the injustice becomes visible and costly.
Birmingham campaign (1963): Topic 8.10
A spring 1963 drive by the SCLC and Fred Shuttlesworth's local movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., that used marches, sit-ins and boycotts to force Birmingham's leaders to negotiate. Its aim was to make segregation visible to the whole country.
Letter from Birmingham Jail: Topic 8.10
King's open reply to eight white clergymen who called his protests “unwise and untimely.” It defends nonviolent direct action and argues that waiting for justice has usually meant never getting it.
Executive Order 8802: Topic 8.10
A 1941 order from President Franklin Roosevelt banning racial discrimination in defense industries and federal jobs. It created the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Randolph's march threat won it.
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Topic 8.10
The August 28, 1963 rally of about 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. It pressed Congress for a civil rights law and also demanded jobs and a higher minimum wage.
SNCC: Topic 8.10
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: a student-led group founded in 1960 that ran sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives in the Deep South.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing: Topic 8.10
On September 15, 1963, Klansmen bombed a Birmingham church that had hosted mass meetings of the 1963 campaign. The blast killed four Black girls. It shocked the country and added pressure on Congress to pass a civil rights bill.
Black nationalism: Topic 8.10
The idea that Black Americans should control the politics, economy and institutions of their own communities. In 'The Ballot or the Bullet' (1964), Malcolm X defined it as Black people controlling the politics and politicians in their own community.
Civil Rights Act of 1964: Topic 8.10
The law that banned discrimination in public places like hotels, restaurants and theaters (Title II) and in employment by race, color, religion, sex or national origin (Title VII). The Supreme Court upheld it under Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.
EEOC: Topic 8.10
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, created by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to investigate complaints of job discrimination. It began work in 1965.
Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964): Topic 8.10
A unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding Title II of the Civil Rights Act. The Court held that Congress could use its Commerce Clause power to ban racial discrimination at a motel that served travelers from other states.
Warren Court (1953–1969): Topic 8.10
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. It expanded civil rights and individual liberties: ending school segregation (Brown), guaranteeing lawyers to poor defendants (Gideon), requiring police warnings (Miranda) and protecting student speech (Tinker).
Sharecropper: Topic 8.10
A farmer who works land owned by someone else for a share of the crop, and is often kept in debt to the owner.
Literacy test: Topic 8.10
A reading or interpretation test used to turn away Black voters; the registrar decided who passed.
Freedom Summer (1964): Topic 8.10
A civil rights campaign in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Volunteers ran Freedom Schools and registered voters despite arrests, beatings and murders.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP): Topic 8.10
An integrated party formed in 1964 to challenge Mississippi's all-white Democratic delegation at the national convention.
Bloody Sunday: Topic 8.10
March 7, 1965: state troopers and a sheriff's posse beat and tear-gassed voting-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Television carried the footage nationwide.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: Topic 8.10
Federal law that suspended literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters, and made covered areas get federal approval before changing voting rules. It enforced the Fifteenth Amendment.
Preclearance: Topic 8.10
The rule in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: covered states and counties had to get federal approval before changing any voting law or procedure.
De jure vs. de facto segregation: Topic 8.10
De jure segregation is separation required by law, as under Jim Crow. De facto segregation is separation that exists in practice, through housing patterns, jobs and custom, with no law requiring it.
Nation of Islam: Topic 8.10
A Black religious and political organization, founded in 1930, that preached Black self-reliance and separation from white society. Malcolm X was its best-known minister until he broke with it in 1964.
Black Power: Topic 8.10
A slogan and movement after 1966 that stressed Black pride, self-defense, and Black-run institutions and political power. Its supporters and critics argued over what it meant, inside the civil rights movement and outside it.
COINTELPRO: Topic 8.10
A secret FBI program, from 1956 to 1971, to spy on and disrupt groups the Bureau called threats, including the Black Panther Party and Martin Luther King Jr.
Kerner Commission (1968): Topic 8.10
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Johnson in July 1967 after the Newark and Detroit riots. Its 1968 report blamed white racism and segregation and urged large federal spending on jobs and housing.
Memphis sanitation strike (1968): Topic 8.10
About 1,300 Black city sanitation workers struck Memphis on February 12, 1968, demanding union recognition, better pay and safer working conditions. King went to support them, tying the movement's fight for civil rights to its fight for jobs.
Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act): Topic 8.10
Signed April 11, 1968, a week after King's death. Title VIII bans refusing to sell or rent a home because of race, color, religion or national origin.
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968): Topic 8.10
Decided June 17, 1968. The Court held that an 1866 Reconstruction-era law bars all racial discrimination in the sale or rental of property, private as well as public.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): Topic 8.12
The main student organization of the New Left. Its 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, called for participatory democracy.
New Left: Topic 8.12
A movement of young radicals in the 1960s, many of them students. The name set them apart from the Old Left of the 1930s, which had organized workers. The New Left took up civil rights, peace and participatory democracy, and it criticized liberals as well as conservatives.
Participatory democracy: Topic 8.12
The idea that ordinary people should take part directly in the decisions that shape their own lives. The Port Huron Statement made it the New Left's central goal, and students first used it to demand a voice in how universities were run.
Silent Spring (1962): Topic 8.13
Rachel Carson's bestseller on the dangers of pesticides such as DDT. It made pollution a public issue, and many historians call it the start of the modern environmental movement.
Industry's case: Topic 8.13
Pesticides made food cheap and fought malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Carson didn't call for banning all of them. She called for care.
Santa Barbara oil spill (1969): Topic 8.13
A well blowout off California that fouled the coast for weeks. Public shock helped push Congress toward the environmental laws of 1969 and 1970.
Cuyahoga River fire (1969): Topic 8.13
Oily debris on Cleveland's river burned in June 1969. It became a national symbol of industrial pollution and fed the push for the Clean Water Act of 1972.
Environmental movement: Topic 8.13
Public campaigns from the 1960s on that pressed government to limit pollution and protect wildlife. They led to Earth Day and the EPA in 1970.
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1970): Topic 8.13
Requires federal agencies to study how a project will affect the environment, in a report called an environmental impact statement, before they build it or pay for it.
Earth Day (1970): Topic 8.13
A nationwide "teach-in" on the environment, modeled on the antiwar teach-ins of the 1960s. About 20 million people took part. Its national coordinator, Denis Hayes, was 25.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 1970): Topic 8.13
The federal agency that sets and enforces national rules on air and water pollution, pesticides, radiation and waste. Created by a presidential reorganization plan, it opened in December 1970.
Clean Air Act (1970): Topic 8.13
Set national air-quality standards and ordered carmakers to cut tailpipe pollution about 90 percent. Automakers said the deadlines were impossible; the EPA and Congress extended them more than once.
Endangered Species Act (1973): Topic 8.13
Protects threatened and endangered species and the habitats they depend on.
Clean Water Act (1972): Topic 8.13
Set limits on what factories and cities could dump into rivers and lakes, and paid for sewage plants.
OPEC and OAPEC: Topic 8.13
OPEC, founded in 1960, coordinates oil exporters' policies. Its Arab members' group, OAPEC, declared the 1973 embargo. Iran and Venezuela, in OPEC, did not join that cutoff.
Project Independence (1973): Topic 8.13
Nixon's goal of meeting America's energy needs without foreign sources by 1980. By 1977, imports covered 46.5 percent of the oil Americans used, up from 34.8 percent in 1973.
55 mph speed limit (1974): Topic 8.13
A national maximum of 55 miles per hour, set in January 1974 to save gasoline. A state that refused lost its federal highway money.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (1975): Topic 8.13
Oil stored in salt caverns on the Gulf Coast for the next emergency. Congress created the reserve in 1975. The first oil went in later.
CAFE standards (1975): Topic 8.13
Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules. Each carmaker's new cars had to average 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985.
Moral equivalent of war (1977): Topic 8.13
Carter's name for his call to save energy. The National Energy Plan he sent Congress two days later put conservation first.
Department of Energy (1977): Topic 8.13
A new cabinet department that combined the Federal Energy Administration, the Energy Research and Development Administration (which ran the nuclear weapons labs) and the Federal Power Commission, plus energy programs from other agencies.
National Energy Act (1978): Topic 8.13
Five laws: a tax on gas-guzzling cars and credits for insulation and solar heat; efficiency rules; limits on burning oil and gas in new power plants; rules that let small producers sell power to utilities; and an end to natural gas price controls. Congress left out Carter's biggest oil tax.
Love Canal (1978): Topic 8.13
A neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, built around a buried chemical waste dump. The emergency there in 1978 helped lead to the Superfund law in 1980.
Superfund (1980): Topic 8.13
A federal fund, paid for largely by taxes on the chemical and oil industries, to clean up toxic waste sites and make polluters pay.
Sagebrush Rebellion: Topic 8.13
A campaign, from 1979, by Western states, ranchers and miners to take state control of federal land and to loosen federal environmental rules. It points ahead to Period 9.
Greenhouse gases: Topic 8.13
Gases that hold heat in the air, chiefly carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas. A 1979 National Academy of Sciences panel estimated that doubling carbon dioxide would warm the Earth near 3°C, give or take 1.5°C.
Watergate: Topic 8.14
The June 17, 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building, and the scandal that followed. President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
Committee for the Re-Election of the President: Topic 8.14
Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign organization. James McCord, one of the five men arrested inside the Democratic offices, was its security coordinator.
Trust in government: Topic 8.14
The share of Americans who told interviewers they trusted Washington to do what is right just about always, or most of the time. The American National Election Studies asked it for decades. Pew Research Center's compilation gives 77% in 1964 and 25% in 1980.
Liberal consensus: Topic 8.14
The broad agreement, from about 1945 to the mid-1960s, that an active federal government should manage the economy and provide a safety net. Democrats and Republicans both ran on it.
Young Americans for Freedom: Topic 8.14
A conservative youth group founded on September 11, 1960, at William F. Buckley Jr.'s family home in Sharon, Connecticut. Its Sharon Statement called for limited government, free markets, and victory over Communism rather than coexistence.
New Right: Topic 8.14
The conservative movement that grew from the 1960s on, joining free-market conservatives, anticommunists and, by the 1970s, religious and social conservatives.
Engel v. Vitale (1962): Topic 8.14
The Supreme Court ruled 6–1 that a prayer written by the state and said in public schools violates the First Amendment, even when a student may stay silent. New York's Regents' prayer was twenty-two words: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."
Law and order: Topic 8.14
Nixon's 1968 promise, and Wallace's sharper one, to use government against riots, street crime, and protests. It spoke to voters who thought the country was coming apart.
Southern strategy: Topic 8.14
Nixon's effort to win white Southern voters who were angry about school desegregation. He asked the courts to delay integration plans and busing, and he nominated Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. The Senate rejected Haynsworth on November 21, 1969, 45 for and 55 against, and Carswell on April 8, 1970, 45 for and 51 against.
CREEP: Topic 8.14
Critics' nickname for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. The committee's own short name was CRP. It raised large sums in cash. Some of that money paid for the Watergate break-in.
Obstruction of justice: Topic 8.14
Using your position to block an investigation. On June 23, 1972, Nixon agreed to have the CIA tell the FBI to stop tracing Watergate money.
Saturday Night Massacre: Topic 8.14
October 20, 1973. Nixon ordered special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired for demanding the tapes. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox.
Impeachment: Topic 8.14
The House charges a federal official. The Senate then holds the trial, and conviction takes two-thirds. The Judiciary Committee approved three articles. Nixon resigned before the full House voted.
Executive privilege: Topic 8.14
A president's claim that some White House conversations stay secret, so advisers will speak honestly. Nixon used it to hold back the tapes.
United States v. Nixon (1974): Topic 8.14
The Court ruled 8–0 that executive privilege cannot hide evidence in a criminal trial. Chief Justice Warren Burger, Nixon's own appointee, wrote the opinion. Nixon had to turn the tapes over.
Imperial presidency: Topic 8.14
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s term, from his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, for a presidency that had grown past the limits the Constitution sets.
Church Committee: Topic 8.14
The Senate select committee, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho, that investigated U.S. intelligence agencies in 1975 and 1976. Its assassination report said government personnel plotted to kill Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965. The final report described the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.
Stagflation: Topic 8.14
Inflation and unemployment rising at the same time. Economists had expected one to fall when the other rose. In the 1970s, a jump in oil prices and competition from newer factories in Germany and Japan helped push both up.
Misery index: Topic 8.14
The inflation rate plus the unemployment rate. Economist Arthur Okun offered the sum as a rough measure of how bad the economy felt. Point at a year on this chart to see it.
WIN (Whip Inflation Now): Topic 8.14
Ford's October 1974 volunteer drive. He asked Americans to spend less, save energy, plant gardens, and wear a button that said WIN. It did not stop inflation. Unemployment reached 9 percent in May 1975.
Supply-side economics: Topic 8.14
The idea that cutting tax rates can raise the total the government collects, if high rates are discouraging work and investment. Arthur Laffer drew a curve for it in 1974, for two aides in the Ford White House.
Jimmy Carter: Topic 8.14
The Democrat elected president in 1976. A peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, he ran as an outsider after Watergate and told voters he would not lie to them.
Evangelical Christianity: Topic 8.14
Protestant Christianity that stresses a personal conversion ('born again'), the authority of the Bible, and spreading the faith. Gallup found in 1976 that 34 percent of Americans said they had been born again. Carter was one of them.
Equal Rights Amendment: Topic 8.14
A proposed constitutional amendment passed by Congress in 1972. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. It needed 38 states. The deadline ran out in 1982, three states short.
STOP ERA: Topic 8.14
Stop Taking Our Privileges. Phyllis Schlafly's campaign, started in September 1972, to keep the states from ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. She argued it would subject women to the draft and take away legal protections for homemakers, including a husband's duty of support.
Roe v. Wade (1973): Topic 8.14
The Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973, 7–2, holding that the right to privacy covers a woman's decision to end a pregnancy. It struck down many state bans on abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion.
Right-to-life movement: Topic 8.14
The campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrict abortion. Catholic organizers built it first. The National Right to Life Committee, founded in 1968, became independent in 1973. Evangelical Protestants joined in growing numbers through the 1970s.
Burger Court: Topic 8.14
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger, 1969 to 1986. More conservative than the Warren Court, yet it ordered school busing, decided Roe v. Wade, and ordered Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes. Three of Nixon's four appointees, Burger, Blackmun, and Powell, were in the Roe majority. Rehnquist dissented.
Proposition 13: Topic 8.14
The June 6, 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes at 1 percent of a home's 1975–76 value, limited later increases to 2 percent a year, and required a two-thirds vote for many new local taxes. It passed with 64.8 percent of the vote.
Tax revolt: Topic 8.14
A late-1970s movement to cut taxes and limit what government spent. Proposition 13 was its biggest win. Republicans then pushed federal income-tax cuts, including the Kemp–Roth bill.
Think tanks: Topic 8.14
Groups that research policies and argue for them. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner with money from Joseph Coors, argued for lower taxes, less regulation, and smaller welfare programs.
Affirmative action: Topic 8.14
Policies that take race, and often sex, into account in admissions and hiring, to open work and schools that had been closed to minorities and women. Critics called racial preferences "reverse discrimination." In Bakke (1978) the Supreme Court struck down fixed racial quotas and allowed race as one factor among others.
Televangelists: Topic 8.14
Ministers with regular television programs. By early 1980 their shows drew about 20 million viewers in a typical week.
Moral Majority: Topic 8.14
A political organization Jerry Falwell founded in June 1979 to register conservative Christians and back conservative candidates. He said the 1973 abortion ruling had brought him into politics. By August 1980 he claimed 72,000 clergy and more than 2 million members.
Religious right: Topic 8.14
Conservative Christians, including many evangelicals and religious fundamentalists, who organized in the late 1970s to influence elections and law. Opposition to abortion and support for school prayer were among their aims. Catholics who opposed abortion were part of the same political turn.
Crisis of confidence: Topic 8.14
Carter's phrase, in his July 15, 1979 address, for a loss of faith in the country and in the future. He pointed to the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., to Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, and dependence on foreign oil. Then he asked Americans to face the energy shortage.
National malaise: Topic 8.14
The nickname reporters gave Carter's July 15, 1979 speech. The word is not in the text. His pollster, Pat Caddell, had said 'malaise' while briefing reporters. On an exam, use Carter's phrase, crisis of confidence. If you write malaise, say it was the press's name for the speech.
Iran hostage crisis: Topic 8.14
On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days. They were angry that the United States had admitted the deposed Shah for medical treatment. A rescue mission failed in April 1980, and eight servicemen died. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981.
Confidence in government: Topic 8.14
How often Americans said they trusted Washington to do what is right just about always, or most of the time. The American National Election Studies asked the question. In Pew Research Center's compilation, that share was 77 percent in 1964 and 25 percent in 1980.
Political realignment: Topic 8.14
A lasting change in which party a region votes for. On these maps the South is the region that shifts: five Deep South states for Goldwater in 1964, Wallace's Southern votes in 1968, Nixon's sweep in 1972, Carter carrying the South in 1976, and Reagan carrying it in 1980.
Point of view: Topic 8.15
What a source's maker believed, wanted and left out. This list shows what a 1965 committee wanted the future to see.
Continuity and change: Topic 8.15
What held steady across a span of years, what changed, and how much. That is the work of this review.
National identity: Topic 8.15
Who counted as a full American, what the country was for, and what people expected of their government, from 1945 to 1980.
corroborate: Topic 8.15
Back your claim with more evidence that agrees with it.
qualify: Topic 8.15
Show where your claim stops being true.
Civil Rights Act (1964) · Voting Rights Act (1965): Topic 8.15
The 1964 act banned segregation in public places and discrimination in hiring. The 1965 act enforced the Fifteenth Amendment by suspending literacy tests and sending federal examiners to register voters.
Immigration and Nationality Act (1965): Topic 8.15
The 1965 law that ended the national-origins quotas of 1924. Visas went by family ties, job skills and refugee status. In the years after, most newcomers came from Latin America and Asia.
Great Society: Topic 8.15
Johnson's programs, from 1964 to 1966, against poverty and discrimination, including Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and federal aid to schools.

Unit 8 Review: 1945–1980

Topics

Key terms

The exam

All units