Period 8

The Cold War was a struggle for world dominance between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union.

It's called the Cold War because no actual military engagement took place between the United States and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Instead, fighting took place in proxy wars conducted in "third-world" countries

In the proxy war of Vietnam, the USSR supported the communist North Vietnamese with money, weapons and training and the US similarly supported the South Vietnamese.

At the Yalta Conference, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France agreed to split Germany into four zones of occupation after the war.

Soviet Union was sending clear signals that it did not intend to give up the territory it had gained from the Nazis, including stalling on its promises to remove troops from oil-rich regions in the Middle East and to allow free elections in conquered Poland.

For three years, the Big Four powers had followed the plan of occupation decided at Yalta, with each power administering a zone of Germany as well as a zone of the capital city of Berlin.

The US ambassador in Moscow warned that the Soviet Union desired to expand throughout the world and prescribed the "containment" of communism as the chief US foreign policy strategy.

The “space race” was a Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop aerospace capabilities, including artificial satellites, unmanned space probes, and human spaceflight.

When the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, in October 1957, it set off alarm bells in the Eisenhower administration and created intense fear and anxiety among the US public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the technological achievements of the United States.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958 as the federal agency with primary responsibility for the

In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which envisioned public education as a key component of national security. The bill appropriated $800 million for loans to college students and for states to improve instruction in the hard sciences.^3

Fidel Castro came to power on January 1, 1959. Castro was not yet a communist, and US policymakers initially took a cautious wait-and-see approach to his regime.

President Dwight Eisenhower cut off diplomatic ties to Cuba and began preparing contingency plans for overthrowing Castro and replacing him with someone more amenable to the United States.

The Kennedy administration established a naval blockade to prevent any more missiles from reaching Cuba, and in no uncertain terms demanded the immediate removal of the missiles that had already been delivered.

Although the Soviets attempted to portray the outcome of the missile crisis as a victory, one of the consequences of the crisis was the ouster of Khrushchev. He was forced into retirement by other Soviet officials who claimed that the missile crisis was proof of Khrushchev’s reckless decision-making and his inability to lead the Soviet Union.

John F. Kennedy came out of the crisis in a much better position. His calm but firm stance in the negotiations was heralded as great statesmanship, though it is often forgotten that his bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion had helped lead to the missile crisis in the first place.

In June 1950 communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States came to the aid of South Korea at the head of a United Nations force composed of more than a dozen countries.

After three years of fighting, the war ended in a stalemate with the border between North and South Korea near where it had been at the war’s beginning.

Five years after the country’s partition, the communist leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, decided to attempt to reunify Korea under his control. On June 25, 1950, Kim launched a surprise invasion of South Korea

General Douglas MacArthur, the United States launched a bold counter-offensive that included a daring amphibious landing in territory held by North Korean forces at Inchon, on South Korea’s western coast. Soon, US forces drove the North Koreans back to the border at the 38th parallel.

The Civil Rights Movement is an umbrella term for the many varieties of activism that sought to secure full political, social, and economic rights for African Americans in the period from 1946 to 1968.

The efforts of civil rights activists resulted in many substantial victories, but also met with the fierce opposition of white supremacists.

Civil rights activists launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, after Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat on the bus for a white person. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a leader of the boycott, which was the first mass direct action of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement and provided a template for the efforts of activists across the country.

The Civil Rights Movement did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in the twentieth century. Efforts to improve the quality of life for African Americans are as old as the United States.

Malcolm X was the most influential thinker of what became known as the Black Power movement, and inspired others like Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party.

The author Richard Wright had also published a book called Black Power in 1954, a non-fiction chronicle of his travels to Africa’s Gold Coast, the country that would become Ghana.^2

Led by Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole, the Nation of Islam, also known as the Black Muslims, had existed since the 1930s. Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, became acquainted with Elijah Muhammad and the teachings of the Nation of Islam while serving time for burglary at the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts.

The Black Panther Party of Self-Defense was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who issued a ten-point program demanding, among other things, freedom, employment, and an immediate end to police brutality.

Jim Crow segregation meant that Southern blacks would continue to live in conditions of poverty and inequality, with white supremacists denying them their hard-won political rights and freedoms.^3

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling held that separate facilities were inherently unequal and thereby declared segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.^5

Civil Rights Movement, women of all ages began to fight to secure a stronger role in American society.

National Organization for Women (NOW) asserted their rights and strove for equality for themselves and others, they upended many accepted norms and set groundbreaking social and legal changes in motion.

In 1963, writer and feminist Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a nonfiction book in which she contested the post-World War II belief that it was women’s destiny to marry and bear children.

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women.

Medical science also contributed a tool to assist women in their liberation. In 1960, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill, freeing women from the restrictions of pregnancy and childbearing.

The Truman Doctrine demonstrated that the United States would not return to isolationism after World War II, but rather take an active role in world affairs.

To help rebuild after the war, the United States pledged $13 billion of aid to Europe in the Marshall Plan.

Kennan's Long Telegram, the US government was dismayed when a number of countries in Europe and Asia adopted communist governments in the late 1940s.

The war left a swath of destruction that crippled infrastructure and led to massive food shortages in the winter of 1946-1947.

The US government feared that a hungry, devastated Europe might turn to communism (as China would do in 1949). To stabilize the European economy, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a plan to provide Europe with $13 billion in economic aid.

The Marshall Plan proved enormously successful, helping to rehabilitate European nations that accepted the aid. It also provided a boost to the American economy, since Marshall Plan funds were used to purchase American goods.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defensive alliance and ramped up security measures at home with the National Security Act.

African Americans and women were entitled to the same benefits as white men under the GI Bill, but often faced difficulty trying to claim their benefits due to discrimination.

The frustration of African American veterans barred from participating in the postwar economic boom became a major motivating factor in the Civil Rights Movement.

Constituting as much as 40% of the American population, baby boomers have exerted a strong pull on American culture at large, particularly during the social movements of the 1960s.

Suburban living promoted the use of automobiles for transportation, which led to a vast expansion of America's highway system.

Suburbs' emphasis on conformity had negative effects on both white women and minorities. Many white women began to feel trapped in the role of housewife, while restrictive covenants barred most African American and Asian American families from living in suburban neighborhoods at all.

In the early 1970s, the post-World War II economic boom began to wane, due to increased international competition, the expense of the Vietnam War, and the decline of manufacturing jobs.

Unemployment rates rose, while a combination of price increases and wage stagnation led to a period of economic doldrums known as stagflation. President Nixon tried to alleviate these problems by devaluing the dollar and declaring wage- and price-freezes.

The crisis was compounded when oil-rich nations in the Middle East declared an embargo against the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel. The oil embargo had a lasting effect on energy prices.

Then the energy crisis hit. In October 1973, the United States supported Israel after a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War.

What caused this slump? The massive cost of the war in Vietnam and the expansion of social programs at home without commensurate tax increases helped to drive inflation (the price of goods and services).

Nixon attempted to extricate the United States from the ongoing war in Vietnam with limited success. Although his administration negotiated a cease-fire in 1973, in 1975 North Vietnam overran the South and united the country under a communist government.

Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 after revelations that he had directed the FBI to cover up an investigation of his supporters' illegal activities at the Watergate office complex.

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), reducing the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals.^7

Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency to combat pollution, as well as protections for female university students in Title IX.^8

Democratic challenger Hubert Humphrey, but Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. Although Nixon was no fan of the Democratic social programs that had taken root during Johnson's presidency

In Ohio, the governor called out the National Guard to put down riots at Kent State University. The guards shot and killed four young people and wounded nine others on May 4, 1970, in an incident that sparked rage across the nation.

Watergate

Tapes of Nixon's conversations in the Oval Office revealed that he had forbidden the FBI from investigating the incident, a clear obstruction of justice.

The Vietnam War was a prolonged military conflict that started as an anticolonial war against the French and evolved into a Cold War confrontation between international communism and free-market democracy.

President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated US involvement in the conflict, authorizing a series of intense bombing campaigns and committing hundreds of thousands of US ground troops to the fight.

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist countries, while the United States and its anticommunist allies backed the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) in the south.

In December 1960, the National Liberation Front, commonly called the Viet Cong, emerged to challenge the South Vietnamese government. A civil war erupted for control of South Vietnam, while Hanoi sought to unite the country under its own communist leadership

After the United States withdrew from the conflict, North Vietnam invaded the South and united the country under a communist government.

The Paris Peace Accords established the terms according to which the last remaining US troops in Vietnam would be withdrawn. In 1975, the North Vietnamese finally achieved the objective of uniting the country under one communist government.

Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973, in a clear attempt to reassert a measure of control over the making of foreign policy and to impose constraints on presidential power.