Unit 8 APUSH

Yalta Conference

A meeting in Yalta of U.S. President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in February 1945, in which the leaders discussed the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan

The United Nations

An international body founded in San Francisco in 1945, consisting of a General Assembly representing all nations and a security council of the United States, Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union, and 6 (now 10) other nations elected on a rotating basis

The Potsdam Conference

The conference, held in late July and early August 1945, in which Soviet Union leader Stalin accepted German reparations only from the Soviet zone, the eastern part of Germany, in exchange for American recognition of the Soviet-drawn Polish border. The agreement paved the way for the division of Germany into East and West.

Harry Truman

Became president of the U.S. after Roosevelt and stood up to Soviet aggression

Joseph Stalin

Did not honor self-determination for nations in Eastern Europe; in American eyes, he caused the Cold War

Containment

The basic U.S. policy of the Cold War, which sought to contain communism within its existing geographic boundaries. Initially, containment focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but in the 1950s it came to include China, Korea, and the post-colonial world

The Long Telegram / George Kennan

An 8,000 word cable that held a confidential message within the U.S. State Department in Moscow. Kennan argued in an influential foreign affairs article that the West’s only recourse was to meet the Soviets “with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”

The Truman Doctrine

President Truman’s commitment to “support free peoples who are resisting to attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” First applied to Greece and Turkey in 1947, it became the justification for U.S. intervention into several countries during the Cold War

The Marshall Plan

A massive infusion of American capital to rebuild the European economy; aid program begun in 1948 to help European economies recover from WW2

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

Military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to counter any possible Soviet threat

The Warsaw Pact

A military alliance established in Eastern Europe in 1953 to counter NATO alliance; it included Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union

NSC-68

Top-secret government report of April 1950 warning that national survival in the face of Soviet communism required a massive military buildup

The Civil War in China — Mao Zedong

Led the communist party who battled Nationalist forces under Jiang Jieshi. In 1949, Mao Zedong had advantage over China and made it the People’s Republic of China under communist/Mao’s rule and leadership

The Korean War / Douglas MacArthur / armistice

The Soviets backed North Korea while the U.S. backed South Korea; on June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an attack on South Korea across the 38th Parallel. The UN assembled an army led by American general Douglass MacArthur and he fought back for South Korean territory, which ended up being back at the 38th Parallel. This was the first major proxy war between the Soviets and Americans and this expanded American involvement in Asia

The Munich Analogy

Political theory derived from the Munich Agreement, suggesting that diplomatic appeasement of aggressive expansionist regimes only encourages further aggression and that such threats must be met with early and decisive force

Cold War Liberalism

A combination of liberal politics that preserved the New Deal welfare state, anticommunism vilifying the Soviet Union abroad, and radicalism at home. Adopted by the Democratic party after WW2

The Taft Hartley Act

Law passed by the Republican-controlled congress in 1947 that overhauled the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, placing restriction on organized labor that made it more difficult for unions to organize workers

The Dixiecrats

Group of Southern Democrats who broke away from the national Democratic Party in 1948 to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, primarily to oppose President Turman’s civil rights platform and maintain racial segregation

Strom Thurmond

Nominated for president, supported the Dixiecrats, was South Caroline Governor

The Fair Deal

The domestic policy agenda by President Truman in 1949, which included; national health-insurance, civil rights legislation, education finding, a housing program, expansion of social security, a higher minimum wage, and a new agricultural program

Loyalty-Security Program

A program created in 1947 by President Truman that permitted officials to investigate any employee of the federal gov. for “subversive” activities

“fellow travelers”

communist sympathizers

HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)

Congressional committee especially prominent during the early years of the cold war that investigated Americans who might be disloyal to the government or might have associated with communists or other radicals

Alger Hiss

Former State Department official who also accompanied FDR to Yalta was accused of being part of a secret communist cell; whether Hiss spied or not, the incident was a national scandal that fed the Red Scare

McCarthyism

A period of intense anti-communist suspicion in the U.S. during the early Cold War, characterized by sensationalist and often unsubstantiated accusations of treason or subversion against individuals in government, entertainment, and academia

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Passed secrets of U.S. things to the Soviets; both convicted and executed, but only Julius was guilty

Dwight D. Eisenhower

More liberal-minded republican → supported programs such as NATO and the Marshall plan and was willing to tolerate labor unions and the welfare state; signed bills increasing federal outlays for veterans’ benefits, housing, highway construction, and social security, and increased the minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour; focused on limiting the cost of containment

“New Look” defense policy

The defense policy of the Eisenhower administration that stepped-up production of the dihydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities

Iran

The U.S. supported them because they an overtly anti-communist government; southern flank of the Soviet Union

Guatemala

The U.S. expanded the agency’s mandate from gathering intelligence to intervening in the affairs of sovereign states

Vietnam

North vs South were fighting; France and Britain started fighting against them but the U.S. stopped that due to fear of Soviet alliance with the country

Domino Theory

President Eisenhower’s theory of containment, which warned that the fall of a non-communist government to communism in Southeast Adia would trigger the spread of communism to neighboring countries

Palestine

Major Arab and Jewish population; the UN partitioned Palestine between Jewish and Arab sectors which caused lots of conflict because Palestinian leaders felt that this was a violation of their right to self-determination while Zionist leaders embraces this and proclaimed the state of Israel

Egypt

Created an independent route that consisted of a pan-Arab socialism designed to sever colonial relationships with the West; created alliances with Egypt over Suez Canal after the British and French almost started war with them; wanted to ensure that Egypt would not become communist

The Eisenhower Doctrine

President Eisenhower’s 1957 declaration that the U.S. would actively combat communism in the Middle East; this was further evidence that the U.S. had extended the global reach of containment by incorporating the Middle East into the Cold War’s rigid binary logic

The Election of 1960

Kennedy vs Nixon; 1st nationally televised debates; Kennedy attracted Catholics, African Americans, and the labor vote and his vice-president running mate, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, helped bring in white southern Democrats

The Bay of Pigs

A failed U.S.-sponser3ed invasion of Cuba in 1961 by anti-Castro forces who planned to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government; went horribly and a lot of people died

The Berlin Wall

12 foot wall; split between East and West Berlin; wall was policed by border guards; served as the supreme symbol of the ongoing Cold War up until it came down in 1989

Cuban Missile Crisis

The 1962 nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the U.S. when the Soviets attempted to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba

The Peace Corps

Program launched by President Kennedy in 1961 through which young American volunteers helped with education, health, and other projects in developing countries around the world; “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”

Vietnam and Kennedy

Kennedy increased military aid to South Vietnamese and expanded the role of U.S. Special Forces (“Green Berets”), who would train the South Vietnamese army in unconventional, small group warfare tactics

The kitchen debate

A 1959 debate over the merits of their rival systems between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushavez at the opening of an American exhibition in Moscow

The Bretton Woods System

Permitted on loaning American capital, at low interest to countries that adopted free-trade capitalist economies

The World Bank

An international bank created to provide loans for the re-construction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of former colonized countries

The IMF (International Monetary Fund)

A fund established to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark

The military-industrial complex

A term president Eisenhower used to refer to the military establishment and defense contractors who, he warned exercised undue influence over the national government

The white collar army

Somber “organization men” who left the home “spritually as well as physically to take vows of organization life”

Michael Harrington’s — “The Other America”

A 1962 book by left-wing social critic Michael Harrington, chronicling the persistence of poverty in the U.S., what he called the nation’s “economic underworld”

The new consumerism

Consumption took on an association with citizenship; New gadgets, time-saving appliances, a car craze, and new mass media that shaped American tastes

The GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act)

This 1944 legislation authorized the government to provide WW2 veterans with funds for education, housing, and health care, as well as businesses and home loans

Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining

The process of trade unions and employers negotiating work-place contracts; large manufacturers acceded to higher wages, confident their profits were secure, and unions dropped their demands for input in company decision making

The influence of the television

Deep reach into the home, television became a principal mediator between the consumer and the marketplace; mostly transmitted a narrow set of middle-class tastes and values

The emergence of the teenager

A term for a young adult; American Youth Culture, focused on the spending power of the “teenager”, emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s; tv and other marketing strategies shifted their focus to teens

Rock ‘n’ Roll

African American commercial art form met the spending power of the rising white middle class; driven by Rock ‘n’ Roll, record sales increased from $213 million to $603 million from 1953-1959; youth culture sold their products

Beats

A small group of literary figures based in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the 1950w who rejected mainstream culture and instead celebrated personal freedom, which often included drug consumption and sexual adventurism

Billy Graham

Reverend; made brilliant use of television, radio, and advertising in spreading his message; was the nation’s leading evangelical and told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life

The Baby Boom

The surge in the American birthrate between 1945 and 1965, which peaked in 1957 with 4.3 million births

Dr. Jonas Salk

Perfected a polio vaccine in 1954 and became a national hero; the free distribution of the vaccine in schools, followed by Dr Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine in 1961, demonstrated the potential of government-sponsored public health programs

Dr. Benjamin Spock

Published in 1946, his book “common sense book of baby and child care” sold more copies in the postwar decades than any other book other than the Bible; he urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding and baby-care schedules of an earlier generation, embracing instead their own instincts and a flexible “common sense” approach

Griswold v. Connecticut

Ruled unfettered access to contraceptive a “privacy right”

Alfred Kinsey (Scientific approach)

Documented the full range of sexual experiences of thousands of Americans; discussed such topics as homosexuality and maternal infidelity in the detached language of science

The Homophile movement

Group of lesbians and gay activists who sought to change American attitudes about same-sex love; remained invisible to most Americans until the 1960s when people talked about gay people’s rights as citizens

Hugh Hefner

Founded playboy magazine in 1953 to advance a counter mobility against domesticity; the magazine imagined a world populated by “hip” bachelors and sexually available women; powerful arbiter of sex in the media

Levittown

A Long Island, New York, suburb, built by William J. Levitt in the late 1940s, that used mass-production techniques to build modest, affordable houses; other Levittown’s were built in PA and NJ

The Federal Housing Administration

The federal government; radically reshaped the home mortgage market making home ownership more accessible than ever before

“Restrictive covenants” - Shelly v. Kraemer

A 1948 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racially restrictive housing occupancy covenants. However, racial discrimination persisted until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968

National Interstate and Defense Highways Act

A 1956 law authorizing the construction of 42,500 miles of new highways and their integration into a single national highway system

Fast food and shopping malls

Malls brought the market to the people instead of the people to the market; fast food became a staple in American diets due to how quick and affordable it was

The Sunbelt

Name applied to the Southwest and South, which grew rapidly after WW2 as a center of defense industries and non-unionized labor

The Kerner commission

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which investigated the 1967 urban riots. Its 1968 report warned of the dangers of “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal”

Urban renewal

Sought to revitalize declining city centers, politicians and private developers proposed razing “blighted” neighborhoods to make way for new construction aimed at the fleeing middle class; new homes, shopping centers, etc.

Changing U.S. immigration policy

Migration increased dramatically after WW2, when mechanization of the island’s sugarcane agriculture put thousands of Puerto Rican laborers out of work

Rights liberalism

The idea that individuals are entitles to state protection from discrimination. This version of liberalism focused on identities — such as race or gender, and eventually sexuality — and was joined to the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal

Jim Crow laws

A legal regime of social segregation and political suppression of African Americans

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, had begun challenging racial segregation in a series of court cases in the 1930s

Executive Order 8802

An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 that prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee

The Double V Campaign

Victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home

CORE

Congress of Racial Equality; civil rights organization founded in 1942 in Chicago by James Farmer and other members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FDR) that espoused nonviolent direct action

Mexican Americans

Japanese Americans

Thurgood Marshall

Brown v. Board

The integration of Little Rock, AK

The death of Emmett Till

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

MLK and the Southern Christian Leadership Council

Greensboro Sit-ins

Ella Baker and SNCC

The Freedom Rides

Eugene “Bull” Connor

Medgar Evers

The March on Washington

The bombing in Birmingham

The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Freedom Summer

Selma

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The 24th Amendment

Black Nationalism