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House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
The HUAC was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. The HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. -
G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 1944)
The G.I. Bill was created to help veterans of World War II. It established hospitals, made low-interest mortgages available and granted stipends covering tuition and expenses for veterans attending college or trade schools. The Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966 extended these benefits to all veterans of the armed forces, including those who had served during peacetime. -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. It separated the former Soviet bloc and the West prior to the decline of communism that followed the political events in eastern Europe in 1989. -
Baby Boom Generation
Baby Boomers are the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation. The term "Baby Boom" is used to identify a massive increase in births following World War II. Baby boomers are those people born worldwide between 1946 and 1964, the time frame most commonly used to define them. The first baby boomers reached the standard retirement age of 65 in 2011. -
Domino Theory
The Domino Theory is a theory that a political event in one country will cause similar events in neighboring countries, like a falling domino causing an entire row of upended dominoes to fall. The Cold War “containment" notion was born of the Domino Theory, which held that if one country fell under communist influence or control, its neighboring countries would soon follow. Containment was the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine as defined by a Truman speech on March 12, 1947. -
Cold War
The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its satellite states) and powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others). The significance of the cold war was that the United States emerged as the sole superpower in the world and ideology wise, capitalism trumped communism. -
Levittown
Levittown utilized mass production techniques to build inexpensive homes in suburban New York to relieve postwar housing shortage; became symbol of movement to suburbs; conformity of houses; diverse communities; home for lower-middle class families. -
Containment Policy
Containment is a geopolitical strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as a Cold War foreign policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge its communist sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam. -
Rust Belt v. Sun Belt
The terms "Sun Belt" and "Rust Belt" are used to informally define regions of the United States.\Many citizens of the Rust Belt moved to the Sun Belt for the changing job opportunities and the warmer climate. The Sun Belt experienced growth in population and the Rust Belt saw a decline in population throughout the 20th century. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy. Its stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was first announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 and further developed on July 12, 1948 when he pledged to contain threats to Greece and Turkey. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $13 billion (nearly $110 billion in 2016 US dollars) in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. In response, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift to carry supplies to the people of West Berlin, a difficult feat given the size of the city's population. -
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. The Soviet Union and its affiliated Communist nations in Eastern Europe founded a rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. -
McCarthyism
McCarthyism was a campaign against alleged communists in the US government carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not in fact belong to the Communist Party. The fear of communism, known as the Red Scare, led to a national witch hunt for suspected communist supporters. -
Rock n' Roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Rock music played an important, but under-appreciated role in subverting the political order of the Soviet Union and its satellites. The attraction of the unique form of music served to undermine Soviet authority by humanizing the West, helped alienate a generation from the political system, and sparked a youth revolution. -
1950s Prosperity
During the Eisenhower era, Americans achieved a level of prosperity they'd never known before. The economy overall grew by 37% during the 1950s. At the end of the decade, the median American family had 30% more purchasing power than at the beginning. -
Beatniks
Beatnik was a media stereotype prevalent throughout the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s.They belonged to a subculture associated with the beat generation. -
Korean War
The Korean War is known as the first armed conflict that took place in the Cold War. It prevented North Korea from taking over all of Korea. It showed that America was willing to send troops to contain communism and that on the other hand, the Soviet Union was willing to send troops to expand communism. -
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American army general and statesman who served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. In 1952, the popularity which Eisenhower had gained during the war helped him win the Republican nomination for presidency and then the presidency itself. -
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. Salk had determined that there were three distinct types of polio viruses and was able to develop a "killed virus" vaccine for the disease. -
Rosenberg Trial
A court case involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Soviet Union. Some have argued that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of McCarthy-era hysteria against communists or of anti-Semitism, as they were Jewish. They were tried, convicted and executed by the United States government. -
Ray Kroc
Ray Kroc was an American businessman. He joined the California company McDonald's in 1954, just a few months after the McDonald brothers had branched out from their original 1940 operation in San Bernardino, with Kroc turning the chain into a nationwide and eventually global franchise, making it the most successful fast food corporation in the world. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies and the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. -
Interstate Highway Act
President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. They were intended to serve several purposes: eliminate traffic congestion; replace what one highway advocate called “undesirable slum areas” with pristine ribbons of concrete; make coast-to-coast transportation more efficient; and make it easy to get out of big cities in case of an atomic attack. -
Space Race
he Space Race refers to the 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for dominance in spaceflight capability. The "race" peaked with the July 20, 1969, US landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11. -
Sputnik
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. -
Anti-War Movement
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. -
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. He negotiated the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and initiated the Alliance for Progress. For 14 days during October 1962, the world held its breath as Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev tried to reach a compromise and avoid nuclear war. -
Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961. On April 17, 1961, 1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. -
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson was an American politician who served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969.In domestic policy, Johnson designed the "Great Society" legislation by expanding civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts, urban and rural development, public services, and his "War on Poverty". In foreign policy, Johnson escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War. -
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women, which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men." -
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The main goal was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. It also instituted federally sponsored social welfare programs. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina. -
Tet Offensive
The Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, launched on January 30, 1968, by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces, and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. -
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was an American politician who served as the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 until 1974, when he resigned from office, the only U.S. president to do so. Détente is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow, May 1972. -
Moon Landing
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first two humans on the Moon. In 1969, the lunar landings transfixed the whole globe. There was a strong rivalry between the Communist Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union seemed to have the upper hand in the space race, when they put the first man in space – Yuri Gagarin, 1961. The race to land on the moon was one that the US wanted to win. -
Vietnamization
Vietnamization of the war was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops." -
26th Amendment
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the minimum age for the military draft age to 18, at a time when the minimum voting age (as determined by the individual states) had historically been 21. -
War Powers Act
The War Powers Act is a federal law intended to check the president's power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of the U.S. Congress. Congress passed it in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to provide a set of procedures for both the President and Congress to follow in situations where the introduction of U.S. forces abroad could lead to their involvement in armed conflict.
