Cold War/Vietnam Keyterms

  • Bay of Pigs

    Bay of Pigs
    The Bay of Pigs is an inlet of the Gulf of Cazones located on the southern coast of Cuba. By 1910, it was included in Santa Clara Province, and then instead to Las Villas Province by 1961
  • Jonas Salk

    Jonas Salk
    Jonas Edward Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines.
  • House of Un-American Activities Committee

    House of Un-American Activities Committee
    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. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security".
  • Ray Kroc

    Ray Kroc
    Raymond Albert "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
  • Servicemen's Readjustment Act

    Servicemen's Readjustment Act
    Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944, this act, also known as the GI Bill, provided veterans of the Second World War funds for college education, unemployment insurance, and housing.
  • Iron Curtain

    Iron Curtain
    the notional barrier separating the former Soviet bloc and the West prior to the decline of communism that followed the political events in eastern Europe.
  • Baby Boom Generation

    Baby Boom Generation
    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.
  • Containment Policy

    Containment Policy
    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.
  • Cold War

    Cold War
    The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc.
  • Levittown

    Levittown
    Levittown, formerly Island Trees, is a hamlet and census-designated place in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, New York on Long Island. It is located half way between the villages of Hempstead and Farmingdale.
  • Berlin Airlift

    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'
  • Truman Doctrine

    Truman Doctrine
    was an American foreign policy whose 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

    Marshall Plan
    was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $13 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II.
  • NATO

    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.
  • McCarthyism

    McCarthyism
    McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.
  • Korean War

    Korean War
    The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border.
  • Rock n Roll

    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, from African American musical styles such as gospel, jump blues, jazz, etc.
  • 1950's prosperity

    1950's prosperity
    Inflation, which had wreaked havoc on the economy immediately after World War II, was minimal, in part because of Eisenhower's persistent efforts to balance the federal budget.
  • Rust Belt vs Sun Belt

    Rust Belt vs Sun Belt
    The post-war period, from the 1950s through the 1980s, was characterized by the migration of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the Northern and Midwestern Rust Belt to the Southern Sun Belt.
  • Beatniks

    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.
  • Rosenberg Trial

    Rosenberg Trial
    Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were United States citizens who were executed on June 19, 1953 after being convicted of committing espionage for the Soviet Union.
  • Dwight D Eisenhower

    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.
  • Domino Theory

    Domino Theory
    the 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.
  • Vietnam War

    Vietnam War
    The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
  • Interstate Highway Act

    Interstate Highway Act
    The law authorized the construction of a 41,000-mile network of interstate highways that would span the nation. It also allocated $26 billion to pay for them.
  • Sputnik

    Sputnik
    each of a series of Soviet artificial satellites, the first of which was the first satellite to be placed in orbit.
  • Space Race

    Space Race
    The 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
  • Moon landing

    Moon landing
    A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both manned and unmanned missions. The first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2 mission, on 13 September 1959.
  • Anti-War Movement

    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
    John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy, commonly referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963.
  • Cuban Missile Crisis

    Cuban Missile Crisis
    also known as the October Crisis (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day (October 16– 28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey
  • Betty Friedan

    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.
  • Lyndon B Johnson

    Lyndon B Johnson
    Lyndon Baines Johnson, often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969.
  • Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

    Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
    The Gulf of Tonkin incident, also known as the USS Maddox incident, was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War.
  • Great Society

    Great Society
    a domestic program in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson that instituted federally sponsored social welfare programs.
  • Tet Offensive

    Tet Offensive
    The Tet Offensive, or officially called The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968 by North Vietnam and NLF, was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War.
  • Richard Nixon

    Richard Nixon
    Richard Milhous Nixon was 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.
  • Vietnamization

    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 Vietnamese forces and assign
  • 26th Amendment

    26th Amendment
    The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old.
  • War Powers Act

    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.