Unit 8 Key Terms APUSH Popovich

Containment

Containment

General U.S. strategy in the Cold War that called for containing Soviet expansion; originally devised by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan.

Truman Doctrine

President Harry S. Truman’s program announced in 1947 of aid to European countries—particularly Greece and Turkey—threatened by communism.

Marshall Plan

U.S. program for the reconstruction of post–World War II Europe through massive aid to former enemy nations as well as allies; proposed by General George C. Marshall in 1947.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Alliance founded in 1949 by ten western European nations, the United States, and Canada to deter Soviet expansion in Europe.

NSC-68

Top-secret policy paper approved by President Truman in 1950 that outlined a militaristic approach to combating the spread of global communism.

Fair Deal

Domestic reform proposals of the Truman administration; included civil rights legislation, national health insurance, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but only extensions of some New Deal programs were enacted.

Taft-Hartley Act

1947 law passed over President Harry Truman’s veto; the law contained a number of provisions to weaken labor unions, including the banning of closed shops.

Dixiecrats

Lower South delegates who walked out of the 1948 Democratic national convention in protest of the party’s support for civil rights legislation and later formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president.

McCarran-Walter Act

Immigration legislation passed in 1952 that allowed the government to deport immigrants who had been identified as communists, regardless of whether or not they were citizens.

Hollywood Ten

A group called before the House Un-American Activities Committee who refused to speak about their political leanings or “name names”—that is, identify communists in Hollywood. Some were imprisoned as a result.

Levittown

Low-cost, mass-produced developments of suburban tract housing built by William Levitt after World War II on Long Island and elsewhere.

Interstate highway system

National network of interstate superhighways; its construction began in the late 1950s for the purpose of commerce and defense. The interstate highways would enable the rapid movement of military convoys and the evacuation of cities after a nuclear attack.

Sputnik

First artificial satellite to orbit the earth; launched October 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union.

Massive retaliation

Strategy that used the threat of nuclear warfare as a means of combating the global spread of communism.

the Beats

A term coined by Jack Kerouac for a small group of poets and writers who railed against 1950s mainstream culture.

Brown v. Board of Education

1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down racial segregation in public education and declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional.

Montgomery bus boycott

Sparked by Rosa Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger, a successful yearlong boycott protesting segregation on city buses; led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Southern manifesto

A document written in 1956 that repudiated the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and supported the campaign against racial integration in public places.

Military-industrial complex

The concept of “an immense military establishment” combined with a “permanent arms industry,” which President Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 Farewell Address.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Organization founded in 1960 to coordinate civil rights sit-ins and other forms of grassroots protest.

Freedom Rides

Bus journeys challenging racial segregation in the South in 1961.

Bay of Pigs invasion

U.S. mission in which the CIA, hoping to inspire a revolt against Fidel Castro, sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland on April 17, 1961; the mission was a spectacular failure.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Tense confrontation caused when the United States discovered Soviet offensive missile sites in Cuba in October 1962; the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was the Cold War’s closest brush with nuclear war.

Civil Rights Act

Law that outlawed discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

Voting Rights Act

Law passed in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965; it authorized federal protection of the right to vote and permitted federal enforcement of minority voting rights in individual counties, mostly in the South.

Great Society

Term coined by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1965 State of the Union address, in which he proposed legislation to address problems of voting rights, poverty, diseases, education, immigration, and the environment.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Legislation passed by Congress in 1964 in reaction to supposedly unprovoked attacks on American warships off the coast of North Vietnam; it gave the president unlimited authority to defend U.S. forces and members of SEATO.

The Feminine Mystique

The book widely credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the United States. Author Betty Friedan focused on college-educated women, arguing that they would find fulfillment by engaging in paid labor outside the home.

Silent Spring

A 1962 book by biologist Rachel Carson about the destructive impact of the widely used insecticide DDT that launched the modern environmentalist movement.

Title IX

Part of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 that banned gender discrimination in higher education.

Strategic Arms Limitations Talks

1972 talks between President Nixon and Secretary Brezhnev that resulted in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (or SALT), which limited the quantity of nuclear warheads each nation could possess, and prohibited the development of missile defense systems.

détente

Period of improving relations between the United States and Communist nations, particularly China and the Soviet Union, during the Nixon administration.

My Lai massacre

Massacre of 347 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai by Lieutenant William Calley and troops under his command. U.S. army officers covered up the massacre for a year until an investigation uncovered the events. Eventually twenty-five army officers were charged with complicity in the massacre and its cover-up, but only Calley was convicted. He served little time for his crimes.

Pentagon Papers

Informal name for the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam conflict; leaked to the press by former official Daniel Ellsberg and published in the New York Times in 1971.

War Powers Act

Law passed in 1973, reflecting growing opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War; required congressional approval before the president sent troops abroad.

Watergate

Washington office and apartment complex that lent its name to the 1972-72 scandal of the Nixon administration; when his knowledge of the break-in at the Watergate and subsequent cover-up were revealed, Nixon resigned the presidency under threat of impeachment.

Oil embargo

Prohibition on trade in oil declared by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, dominated by Middle Eastern producers, in October 1973 in response to U.S. and western European support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The rise in gas prices and fuel shortages resulted in a global economic recession and profoundly affected the American economy.

Three Mile Island

Nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, site of 1979 accident that released radioactive steam into the air; public reaction ended the nuclear power industry’s expansion.

Iran-Contra Affair

Scandal of the second Reagan administration involving sales of arms to Iran in partial exchange for release of hostages in Lebanon and use of the arms money to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, which had been expressly forbidden by Congress.