CIS US History ch 22

Four Freedoms

Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, as described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his January 6, 1941, State of the Union address.

isolationism

The desire to avoid foreign entanglements that dominated the U.S. Congress in the 1930s; beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents’ ships and the sale of arms to countries at war.

Neutrality Acts

Series of laws passed between 1935 and 1939 to keep the United States from becoming involved in war by prohibiting American trade and travel to warring nations.

America First Committee

An influential organization led by prominent businessmen (1940–1941) opposed to American involvement in World War II.

Lend-Lease Act

1941 law that permitted the United States to lend or lease arms and other supplies to the Allies, signifying the increasing likelihood of American involvement in World War II.

Axis powers

In World War II, the nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

D-Day

June 6, 1944, when an Allied amphibious assault landed on the Normandy coast and established a foothold in Europe, leading to the liberation of France from German occupation.

Holocaust

Systematic racist attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe, resulting in the murder of over 6 million Jews and more than a million other “undesirables.”

GI Bill of Rights

The 1944 legislation that provided money for education and other benefits to military personnel returning from World War II.

bracero program

System agreed to by Mexican and American governments in 1942 under which tens of thousands of Mexicans entered the United States to work temporarily in agricultural jobs in the Southwest; lasted until 1964 and inhibited labor organization among farm workers since braceros could be deported at any time.

zoot suit riots

1943 riots in which sailors on leave attacked Mexican American youths.

Japanese American internment

Policy adopted by the Roosevelt administration in 1942 under which 110,000 persons of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, were removed from the West Coast and forced to spend most of World War II in internment camps; it was the largest violation of American civil liberties in the twentieth century.

Korematsu v. United States

1944 Supreme Court case that found Executive Order 9066 to be constitutional. Fred Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, defied the military order that banned all persons of Japanese ancestry from designated western coastal areas. The Court upheld Korematsu’s arrest and internment.

second Great Migration

The movement of Black migrants from the rural South to the cities of the North and West, which occurred from 1941 through World War II, that dwarfed the Great Migration of World War I.

double-V

Led by the Pittsburgh Courier, the movement that pressed for victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. It argued that since African Americans were risking their lives abroad, they should receive full civil rights at home.

V-E Day

May 8, 1945, the day World War II officially ended in Europe.

Manhattan Project

Secret American program during World War II to develop an atomic bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer led the team of physicists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Potsdam conference

Last meeting of the major Allied powers; the conference that took place outside Berlin from July 17 to August 2, 1945, at which U.S. president Harry Truman, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and British prime minister Clement Attlee finalized plans begun at Yalta.

Yalta conference

Meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at a Crimean resort to discuss the postwar world on February 4–11, 1945; Joseph Stalin claimed large areas in eastern Europe for Soviet domination.

Bretton Woods conference

International meeting held in the town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 in which participants agreed that the American dollar would replace the British pound as the most important international currency. The conference also created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to promote rebuilding after World War II and to ensure that countries did not devalue their currencies.

United Nations

Organization of nations to maintain world peace established in 1945 and headquartered in New York.