APUSH Ch. 28 Terms

Baby Boom

The dramatic surge in birth rates in the United States following World War II (roughly 1946–1964), as returning veterans started families, leading to a population explosion that reshaped American society, culture, and the economy.

Levittowns

Mass-produced suburban housing developments built by William Levitt and Sons in the postwar era (beginning in New York, 1947), symbolizing the rapid growth of American suburbia and affordable homeownership for working-class families.

Keynesian Economics

An economic theory developed by British economist John Maynard Keynes arguing that government spending and intervention should be used to stimulate demand and stabilize economies during recessions, forming the basis of much U.S. postwar economic policy.

AFL-CIO

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations — a major national federation of labor unions formed in 1955 through a merger, representing millions of American workers and advocating for labor rights and better wages.

Teamsters

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest and most powerful labor unions in the U.S., originally representing truck drivers and warehouse workers, known for its aggressive tactics and later associations with organized crime.

Jimmy Hoffa

Controversial president of the Teamsters union (1957–1971), known for his fierce advocacy for workers but also his ties to organized crime; he was convicted of jury tampering and fraud and mysteriously disappeared in 1975.

Operation Dixie

A post-WWII campaign by the CIO to organize labor unions in the American South, largely unsuccessful due to racial tensions, employer resistance, and the anti-communist climate that undermined interracial union organizing.

DDT

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — a powerful synthetic pesticide widely used after WWII to combat insects and disease, later found to be highly toxic to wildlife and ecosystems; its dangers were famously exposed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962).

Television

The mass-market broadcast medium that became the dominant form of American entertainment and communication in the 1950s, fundamentally transforming politics, culture, advertising, and daily life.

Transistor

A small semiconductor device invented at Bell Labs in 1947 that replaced bulky vacuum tubes, enabling the miniaturization of electronics and laying the technological foundation for modern computers, radios, and consumer electronics.

Computers

Early electronic machines developed in the 1940s–50s capable of processing data and performing complex calculations at high speed, initially used by governments and corporations and eventually revolutionizing virtually every aspect of modern life.

UNIVAC

Universal Automatic Computer — the first commercially produced computer in the United States (1951), famously used by CBS to predict Eisenhower's landslide victory in the 1952 presidential election, demonstrating the potential of computing to the public.

Hydrogen Bomb

A thermonuclear weapon far more powerful than the atomic bomb, first tested by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953, dramatically escalating the stakes of the Cold War arms race.

ICBM

Intercontinental Ballistic Missile — a long-range nuclear-armed missile capable of striking targets thousands of miles away; developed by both the U.S. and USSR in the 1950s, ICBMs became the cornerstone of Cold War nuclear deterrence strategy.

Mercury Project

The United States' first human spaceflight program (1958–1963), aimed at putting an American astronaut in orbit, competing directly with the Soviet space program during the early Cold War space race.

Alan Shepard

American astronaut who became the first U.S. citizen in space on May 5, 1961, completing a suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7, shortly after the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

John Glenn

American astronaut and Marine pilot who, on February 20, 1962, became the first American to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7, making him a national hero during the Cold War space race.

Yuri Gagarin

Soviet cosmonaut who on April 12, 1961 became the first human being to travel into outer space and orbit the Earth, a major Cold War propaganda victory for the Soviet Union and a shock to American prestige.

Apollo Missions

NASA's human spaceflight program (1961–1972) aimed at landing Americans on the Moon, culminating in the historic Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface.

Sputnik

The world's first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, shocking Americans, igniting fears of Soviet technological superiority, and accelerating the U.S. space program and science education initiatives.

Federal Highway Act

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, signed by President Eisenhower, which authorized the construction of the 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System, transforming American transportation, commerce, suburban growth, and military logistics.

GI Bill

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, which provided returning WWII veterans with benefits including college tuition, low-cost mortgages, and unemployment insurance, fueling the growth of the middle class and suburbia in postwar America.

Dr. Benjamin Spock

American pediatrician whose 1946 book Baby and Child Care revolutionized American parenting by encouraging a more nurturing and flexible approach to raising children, becoming one of the best-selling books of the 20th century.

Echo Park

A 1948 novel by Chester Himes — though more commonly associated with the controversy surrounding the eviction of Mexican American families from Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles to build Dodger Stadium, symbolizing urban renewal's displacement of minority communities.

The Catcher in the Rye

A landmark 1951 novel by J.D. Salinger, narrated by alienated teenager Holden Caulfield, capturing postwar youth disillusionment and rebellion against adult hypocrisy; it became a defining text of American adolescent identity.

Jack Kerouac

Beat Generation author best known for his 1957 novel On the Road, which celebrated spontaneity, freedom, and rejection of postwar conformity and consumerism, becoming a touchstone of 1950s counterculture.

James Dean

Iconic young Hollywood actor of the 1950s whose roles in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden embodied teenage alienation and rebellion; his death in a 1955 car crash at age 24 cemented his status as a cultural legend.

Elvis Presley

Groundbreaking American singer and musician who fused rhythm and blues, country, and gospel into rock and roll, becoming a cultural phenomenon in the mid-1950s and challenging racial and social boundaries in American music and popular culture.

American Bandstand

A popular televised music and dance show hosted by Dick Clark beginning in 1957, which brought rock and roll into American living rooms, helped launch the careers of many artists, and reflected the growing influence of youth culture.

Payola Scandals

Late 1950s–early 1960s revelations that record companies were secretly paying radio disc jockeys to promote certain songs, leading to congressional investigations and reforms in broadcast regulations.

The Other America

A 1962 book by social critic Michael Harrington that exposed the widespread and largely hidden poverty affecting millions of Americans, directly influencing President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs in the 1960s.

Urban Renewal

A federally funded postwar initiative to redevelop deteriorating city areas, which, while intended to modernize cities, frequently displaced poor and minority communities through demolition of their neighborhoods to build highways, stadiums, and middle-class housing.

Brown v. Board of Education

The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that unanimously declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson and igniting the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Thurgood Marshall

Civil rights attorney who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP; he later became the first African American Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967.

Massive Resistance

A campaign led by Southern politicians and white supremacists in the mid-to-late 1950s to block implementation of the Brown decision through legislation, school closures, and intimidation of Black students and civil rights advocates.

Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham

A series of civil rights legal battles involving Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth challenging Birmingham, Alabama's segregation ordinances, contributing to the broader legal and activist dismantling of Jim Crow laws.

Little Rock Nine

Nine Black students who, in September 1957, enrolled in the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, facing violent white mobs and requiring federal troops sent by President Eisenhower to enforce their right to attend.

Orval Faubus

Governor of Arkansas who in 1957 ordered the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School, defying federal law and forcing President Eisenhower to intervene with federal troops.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Baptist minister and the preeminent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, who advocated nonviolent civil disobedience inspired by Gandhi; he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, and countless other campaigns before his assassination in 1968.

Rosa Parks

African American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, led to her arrest and sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, becoming an enduring symbol of resistance.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

A 381-day protest (1955–1956) in Montgomery, Alabama, during which African Americans refused to ride city buses to protest segregated seating, resulting in a Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional and launching Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

Jackie Robinson

The first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking the color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, enduring racial hostility while becoming a symbol of dignity and the possibility of integration.

SCLC

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference — a civil rights organization founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black ministers to coordinate nonviolent protest campaigns across the South against segregation and racial discrimination.

Army-McCarthy Hearings

Televised 1954 Senate hearings in which Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated alleged communist infiltration of the U.S. Army; attorney Joseph Welch's famous challenge of McCarthy's decency helped turn public opinion against McCarthy and led to his censure.

John Foster Dulles

U.S. Secretary of State under President Eisenhower (1953–1959), who championed an aggressive Cold War foreign policy including "massive retaliation" and "brinkmanship" — threatening nuclear war to deter Soviet aggression.

Geneva Conference 1954

An international conference that ended the First Indochina War, temporarily dividing Vietnam at the 17th parallel into a communist North and non-communist South, setting the stage for American involvement and the eventual Vietnam War.

Ho Chi Minh

Vietnamese communist revolutionary and nationalist leader who led the Vietminh against French colonial rule, became the founding president of North Vietnam, and inspired the prolonged struggle for Vietnamese unification that drew the United States into war.

Vietminh

The League for the Independence of Vietnam, a communist-led nationalist movement founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 that successfully fought French colonial forces, culminating in the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Dien Bien Phu

The decisive 1954 battle in which Vietminh forces besieged and defeated the French military garrison, ending French colonial rule in Indochina and leading directly to the Geneva Conference and the partition of Vietnam.

Creation of Israel

The establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, following a United Nations partition plan for British-controlled Palestine, immediately triggering the first Arab-Israeli War and reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Suez Crisis

The 1956 international crisis triggered when Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting a joint military invasion by Britain, France, and Israel, which the U.S. and USSR both opposed, forcing a withdrawal and signaling the decline of European colonial power.

Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi

The U.S.-backed monarch of Iran who was restored to power in a 1953 CIA-assisted coup and ruled as an autocrat until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, his reign illustrating Cold War U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

Fidel Castro

Cuban revolutionary leader who overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959 and established a communist government aligned with the Soviet Union, becoming a central figure in Cold War tensions, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Hungarian Revolution

A nationwide anti-Soviet revolt in Hungary in October–November 1956, brutally suppressed by Soviet military forces, which exposed the limits of American "liberation" rhetoric and demonstrated the USSR's iron grip on Eastern Europe.

Nikita Khrushchev

Soviet Premier from 1955 to 1964, who denounced Stalin's purges in his "Secret Speech," pursued a policy of "peaceful coexistence" with the West while also overseeing the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviet space program.

U-2 Incident

The 1960 international crisis in which an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory, its CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured, and the episode destroyed the Paris Summit peace talks and deepened Cold War tensions.

Military-Industrial Complex

The term used by President Eisenhower in his famous 1961 farewell address to warn against the growing and potentially dangerous alliance between the U.S. defense industry, the military, and government — cautioning that this relationship could unduly influence American policy and democracy.