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Dwight D. Eisenhower
In 1945, Eisenhower was appointed U.S. Army chief of staff. He became the first Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1951. In 1952, he was U.S. elected president. He served two terms before retiring to Gettysburg in 1961 and passed away on March 28, 1969, at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. United States general who supervised the invasion of Normandy and the defeat of Nazi Germany; Became 34th President of the United States -
Ray Kroc
Ray Kroc was an American Entrepreneur best known for expanding McDonald's from a local chain to the world's most profitable restaurant franchise operation. His organizations founded were McDonald's, Hamburger University, McCafe. -
Lyndon B. Johnson
36th President. Many of the programs Johnson introduced–including Medicare and Head Start–made a lasting impact in the areas of health, education, urban renewal, conservation and civil rights. Despite his impressive domestic achievements, however, Johnson’s legacy was equally defined by his failure to lead the nation out of the quagmire of the Vietnam War (1954-75). He declined to run for a second full term in office, and retired to his Texas ranch after leaving the White House in January 1969. -
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was the 37th U.S. president and the only commander-in-chief to resign from his position, after the 1970s Watergate scandal. Nixon’s achievements included forging diplomatic ties with China and the Soviet Union, and withdrawing U.S. troops from an unpopular war in Vietnam. However, Nixon’s involvement in Watergate tarnished his legacy and deepened American cynicism about government. -
Jonas Salk
An American physician and medical researcher who developed the first safe and effectivevaccine for polio. In 1947, Salk became head of the Virus Research Lab at the university of Pittsburgh. That is where he beganresearch on polio. On April 12, 1955, the vaccine was released for use in the United States. He established the Salk institute for Biological studies in 1963 and passed away in 1995. -
John F. Kennedy
Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States, the youngest man elected in office and also the youngest President to die. Cold War rhetoric dominated the 1960 presidential campaign. Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon both pledged to strengthen American military forces and promised a tough stance against the Soviet Union and international communism. Kennedy warned of the Soviet's growing arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pledged to revitalize Americ -
Betty Friedan
Writer, feminist and women's rights activist Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963) and co-founded the National Organization for Women. -
Gary Powers
On May 1, 1960, the pilot of an American U-2 spyplane was shot down while flying though Soviet airspace. The fallout over the incident resulted in the cancellation of the Paris Summit scheduled to discuss the ongoing situation in divided Germany, the possibility of an arms control or test ban treaty, and the relaxation of tensions between the USSR and the United States. -
Roy Benavidez
Roy P. Benavidez, a former Green Beret sergeant who received the Medal of Honor from President Ronald Reagan for heroism while wounded in the Vietnam War, then fought to keep the Government from cutting off his disability payments, died on Sunday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. He was 63. -
Abbie Hoffman
As a radical, revolutionary, political activist and social clown, if somebody is against something, odds are good Hoffman is against it too. Although his fame is cemented in the '70s, his revolutionary bona fides are established in the '60s. Hoffman's career as an activist starts modestly, with some civil rights work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He then creates the Youth International Party(Yippies). -
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
The committee wielded its subpoena power as a weapon and called citizens to testify in high-profile hearings before Congress. This intimidating atmosphere often produced dramatic but questionable revelations about Communists infiltrating American institutions and subversive actions by well-known citizens. HUAC’s controversial tactics contributed to the fear, distrust and repression that existed during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. -
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 a combination of African-American genres such as blues, boogie-woogie, jump blues, jazz, and gospel music, Together with Western swing and country music. Though elements of rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, The genre did not acquire its name until the 1950s. -
War Powers Act
An American emergency law that increased Federal power during World War II. The act was signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt less than two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The act was similar to the Departmental Reorganization Act of 1917 as it was signed shortly before the U.S. engaged in a large war and increased the powers of the president's U.S. Executive Branch. The act gave the President enormous authority to execute WWII in an efficient manner. -
Venona Papers
In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union, including those chronicled in NOVA's "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spi -
G.I. Bill (Servicesmen'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. From 1944 to 1949, nearly 9 million veterans received close to $4 billion from the bill’s unemployment compensation program. The education and training provisions existed until 1956, while the Veterans’ Administration offered insured loans until 1962. -
Baby Boom 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 first baby boomers reached the standard retirement age of 65 in 2011. There are about 76 million boomers in the U.S., representing about 29 percent of the population. In Canada, they are known as "Boomies;" six million reside there. In Britain, the boomer generation is known as "the bulge." -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the imaginary 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. The term symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the west and non-Soviet-controlled areas. -
Red belt and Sun Belt (why did people move there)
The economic boom in cities of the Midwest, Northeast, and West - spawned particularly by World War II - had come to a grinding halt by the early 1970s. Many of the factories and plants that had lured African Americans from the South during and after the war were abandoned in the wake of a globalizing economy and the oil crisis of the early 1970s. The new economic order literally destroyed communities and eliminated hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. -
Truman Doctrine
With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was intended to rebuild the economies and spirits of western Europe, primarily. Marshall was convinced the key to restoration of political stability lay in the revitalization of national economies. Further George Marshall saw political stability in Western Europe as a key to blunting the advances of communism in that region. -
Cold War
The Cold War is the name given to the relationship that developed primarily between the USA and the USSR after World War Two. The Cold War was to dominate international affairs for decades and many major crises occurred – the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Hungary and the Berlin Wall being just some. For many, the growth in weapons of mass destruction was the most worrying issue. Ended in December of 1991. -
Berlin Airlift
At the end of the Second World War, U.S., British, and Soviet military forces divided and occupied Germany. Also divided into occupation zones, Berlin was located far inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. The United States, United Kingdom, and France controlled western portions of the city, while Soviet troops controlled the eastern sector. -
Containment Policy
Containment was a United States policy using numerous strategies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. 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. -
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. After the destruction of the Second World War, the nations of Europe struggled to rebuild their economies and ensure their security. The former required a massive influx of aid to help the war-torn landscapes re-establish industries and produce food, and the latter required assurances against a resurgent Germany or incursions from the Soviet Union. -
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. -
Korean War
The Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. -
Rosenberg Trail
The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins in New York Southern District federal court. Judge Irving R. Kaufman presides over the espionage prosecution of the couple accused of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians (treason could not be charged because the United States was not at war with the Soviet Union). -
Domino Theory
After Eisenhower’s speech, the phrase “domino theory” began to be used as a shorthand expression of the strategic importance of South Vietnam to the United States, as well as the need to contain the spread of communism throughout the world. After the Geneva Conference ended the French-Viet Minh war and split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th parallel, the United States spearheaded the organization of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). -
"McCarthyism"
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. It also means "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism." The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from 1950 to 1956 and characterized by heightened political repression against communists. -
Interstate Highway Act
President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of “speedy, safe transcontinental travel.” At the same time, highway advocates argued, “in case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net [would] permit quick evacuation of target areas.” -
Space Race (Sputnik and Moon landings)
By the mid-1950s, the U.S.-Soviet Cold War had worked its way into the fabric of everyday life in both countries, fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media. These tensions would continue throughout the space race, exacerbated by such events as the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Apollo 13 was the most famous. -
1960s culture
Bell-bottoms and incense, long hair, free love & psychedelic rock-the 1960s are commonly reduced to a set of easy -to-replicate images, phrases, and styles. America democratic government was corrupt-filled with dishonest, self-seeking politicians and corporate-serving lobbyists. Churches were less spiritual oases than repositories. -
Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506. A counter-revolutionary military, trained and funded by the United States government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) and intended to overthrow the increasingly communist government of Fidel Castro. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis, was a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning Soviet ballistic missiles deployment in Cuba. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave broad congressional approval for expansion of the Vietnam War. Assertedly in reaction to two allegedly unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Its stated purpose was to approve and support the determination of the president, as commander in chief, in taking all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. -
Great Society
When John Gardner became the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, he was joining President Lyndon Johnson as the engineer of his ambitious agenda of social reform known as the "Great Society." "the Great Society" in which America ended poverty, promoted equality, improved education, rejuvenated cities, and protected the environment. This became the blueprint for the most far-reaching agenda of domestic legislation; legislation that has had a profound effect on American Society. -
Medicaid
President Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments which established Medicare and Medicaid, promising that they would "improve a wide range of health and medical services for Americans of all ages." Now Presidential hopefuls are debating the fate of federally funded health insurance in very different terms. -
Meeicare
In the United States, Medicare is a national social insurance program, administered by the U.S. federal government since 1966, currently using about 30 private insurance companies across the United States. Medicare provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older who have worked and paid into the system. It also provides health insurance to younger people with disabilities, end stage renal disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. -
Miranda v. Arizona
Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court. In a 5-4 majority, the Court held that both inculpatory and exculpatory statements made in response to interrogation by a defendant in police custody will be admissible at trial only if the prosecution can show that the defendant was informed of the right to consult with an attorney before and during questioning and of the right against self-incrimination before police questioning. -
Tet Offensive 1968
70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its support of the Saigon regime. -
Vietnamization
U.S. President Richard Nixon introduced a new strategy called Vietnamization that was aimed at ending American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam. The increasingly unpopular war had created deep divisions in American society. Nixon believed his Vietnamization strategy, which involved building up South Vietnam’s military strength in order to facilitate a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops, would prepare the South Vietnamese. -
Vietnam War including the fall of Saigon 1975
The war began in 1954, after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh & his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, & continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between the U.S. & the Soviet Union. The fall of Saigon (now Ho Chin Minh City) effectively marked the end of the Vietnam War. After the introduction of Vietnamisation by President Richard Nixon, US forces in South Vietnam had been constantly reduced leaving the military of South Vietnam to defend their country against the North. -
1950s prosperity (include suburbanism and white flight)
The years after World War Two saw a massive movement of people into new suburbs. The growth of suburbs resulted from several historical forces, including the social legacy of the Depression, mass demobilization after the War (and the consequent “baby boom”), greater government involvement in housing and development, the mass marketing of the automobile, and a dramatic change in demographics. As families began moving from farms and cities into new suburbs,American culture underwent transformation
