Military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to counter any possible Soviet threat.
NATO
President Eisenhower’s 1957 declaration that the United States would actively combat communism in the Middle East.
Eisenhower Doctrine
Aid program begun in 1948 to help European economies recover from World War II.
Marshall Plan
Top-secret government report of April 1950 warning that national survival in the face of Soviet communism required a massive military buildup.
NSC-68
The defense policy of the Eisenhower administration that stepped up production of the hydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities
"New Look"
The domestic policy agenda announced by President Harry S Truman in 1949. Including civil rights, health care, and education reform, Truman’s initiative was only partially successful in Congress.
Peace Corps
The 1962 nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Cuban Missile Crisis
The July 1945 meeting in which American officials convinced the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, or far eastern part of Germany. With the other Allies.
Potsdam Conference
President Eisenhower’s theory of containment, which warned that the fall of a noncommunist government to communism in Southeast Asia would trigger the spread of communism to neighboring countries.
Domino Theory
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.
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
The domestic policy agenda announced by President Harry S Truman in 1949. Including civil rights, health care, and education reform, Truman’s initiative was only partially successful in Congress.
Fair Deal
A military alliance established in Eastern Europe in 1955 to counter the NATO alliance. It included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union.
Warsaw Pact
President Harry S Truman’s commitment to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” First applied to Greece and Turkey in 1947, it became the justification for
Truman Doctrine
The basic U.S. policy of the Cold War, which sought to keep communism within its existing geographic boundaries. Initially, it focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but in the 1950s, the policy included China,
Containment
An international body agreed upon at the Yalta Conference and founded at a conference in San Francisco in 1945. It consisted of a General Assembly, in which all nations are represented, and a Security Council of the five
United Nations
A 1961 failed U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro forces who planned to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government.
Bay of Pigs
A combination of moderate liberal policies that preserved the programs of the New Deal welfare state and included forthright anticommunism that vilified the Soviet Union abroad and radicalism at home.
Cold War Liberalism
An act that expanded the number of people paying income taxes from 3.9 million to 42.6 million. These taxes on personal incomes and business profits paid half the cost of World War II.
Revenue Act
An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 that authorized the War Department to force Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes and hold them in relocation camps for the rest of the war.
Executive Order 9066
The name given to the Allied invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944. It was the largest amphibious assault in world history. The invasion opened a second front against the Germans and moved the Allies closer to victory
D-Day
An authoritarian system of government characterized by dictatorial rule, extreme nationalism, disdain for civil society, and a conviction that imperialism and warfare are principal means by which a nation attains greatness
Fascism
A press release by President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941 calling for economic cooperation, national self-determination, and guarantees of political stability after the war.
Atlantic Charter
A political and military alliance formed in 1936 between German dictator Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Rome-Berlin Axis
A meeting of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and 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 Russia
Yalta Conference
Popularly known as the GI Bill, legislation authorizing the U.S. government to provide World War II veterans with funds for education, housing, and health care, as well as loans to start businesses and buy homes.
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act
Legislation that sought to avoid entanglement in foreign wars while protecting trade. It imposed an embargo on selling arms to warring countries and declared that Americans traveling on the ships of belligerent nations
Neutrality Act
A meeting held in September 1938 during which Britain and France agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland—a German-speaking border area of Czechoslovakia—in return for Hitler’s pledge to seek no more territory.
Munich Conference
Legislation in 1941 that enabled Britain to obtain arms from the United States without cash but with the promise to reimburse the United States when the war ended. The act reflected Roosevelt’s desire to assist the British
Lend-Lease Act
Top-secret project authorized by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 to develop an atomic bomb ahead of the Germans. The Americans worked on the project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, among other highly secretive sites
Manhattan Project
This series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States permitted millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term low-wage labor contracts.
Bracero Program
Identified by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most basic human rights. The president used these ideas to justify support for England during World War II, which in turn pulled the United States into the war.
Four Freedoms
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.
Executive Order 8802
Roosevelt’s program that was outlined in his inaugural address
New Deal
Roosevelts "inner circle" who were experts in their field
Brain Trust
A belief that when there is an economic downturn, a government needs to spend money to revive the economy and when it normalizes, to balance the budget and cut government spending
Keynesian Economic Policy
Government spending, in excess of revenue, of funds raised by borrowing money
Deficit spending
The new law restored tribal ownership of lands, recognized tribal constitutions and government, and provided loans to tribes for economic development.
Indian Reorganization Act
Conservatives that believed that the New Deal was socialistic and allowed for reckless spending
Liberty League
Shantytowns
Hoovervilles
It provided loans over 20-30 years with equal monthly payments with 10% to 20% down
Federal Housing Administration
The idea that the business community can regulate itself
Volunteerism
WPA agencies also found part-time occupations for actors, artists, musicians, and writers.
Federal Arts Project
Unique American musical form, developed in New Orleans and other parts of the South before World War I. Musicians developed an ensemble improvisational style.
Jazz
The idea that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, have a common heritage and destiny and should cooperate in political action.
Pan-Africanism
Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans after the Civil War but was reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, Jewish people, and other minorities.
Ku Klux Klan
A term for anticommunist hysteria that swept the United States, first after World War I, and led to a series of government raids on alleged subversives and a suppression of civil liberties.
Red Scare
Nickname for the scandal in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall accepted $300,000 in bribes for leasing oil reserves on public land in Wyoming. It was part of a larger pattern of corruption that marred Warren G. Harding
Teapot Dome
A system of labor relations that stressed management’s responsibility for employees’ well-being.
Welfare Capitalism
During the Seattle General Strike, the unions called for federal ownership of the railroads. Conservatives viewed this as a socialist attack on capitalism and representative government.
Industrial Democracy
New forms of borrowing such as auto loans and installment plans, which flourished in the 1920s but help trigger the Great Depression.
Consumer Credit
The ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol that went into effect in January 1920 with the Eighteenth Amendment. It was repealed in 1933.
Prohibition
The phrase coined by writer Gertrude Stein to refer to young artists and writers who had suffered through World War I and felt alienated from America’s mass-culture society in the 1920s.
Lost Generation
A series of searches led by the attorney general on radical organizations that peaked in January 1920, when federal agents arrested six thousand citizens and aliens and denied them access to legal counsel.
Palmer Raids
The 1925 trial of a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating his state’s ban on teaching evolution. The trial created a nationwide media frenzy and came to be seen as a showdown between urban and rural values.
Scopes trial
The exercise of popular cultural influence abroad as American radio and movies became popular around the world in the 1920s, transmitting American cultural ideals overseas.
Soft Power
This person was the most powerful gangster of the 1920s from his headquarters in Chicago. His organized crime ring was involved in prostitution, gambling, and narcotics.
Al Capone
A young woman of the 1920s who defied conventional standards of conduct by wearing short skirts and makeup, freely spending the money she earned on the latest fashions, dancing to jazz, and flaunting her liberated life
Flapper
A 1924 law limiting annual immigration from each country to no more than 2 percent of that nationality’s percentage of the U.S. population as it had stood in 1890. The law severely limited immigration
National Origins Act
Wartime law that prohibited any words or behavior that might promote resistance to the United States or help in the cause of its enemies.
Sedition Act of 1918
A federal agency that was established in July 1917 to direct military production, including allocation of resources, conversion of factories to war production, and setting of prices.
War Industries Board
A 1917 intercepted dispatch in which the German foreign secretary urged Mexico to join the Central Powers and promised that if the United States entered the war, Germany would help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, and A
Zimmerman telegram