The Postwar Period & Cold War (1945–1980): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
99 flashcard terms for AP U.S. History Unit 8, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 27-question quiz — free, no account needed.
Wartime allies split over Eastern Europe, atomic secrecy, and incompatible systems — by 1947 rivalry had hardened into a global contest between the U.S. and USSR.
Containment
George Kennan's doctrine: patiently block Soviet expansion everywhere until the system mellowed or collapsed — America's grand strategy for four decades.
Truman Doctrine (1947)
Aid to Greece and Turkey framed as a global pledge to support 'free peoples' resisting subjugation — containment proclaimed.
Marshall Plan (1948)
$13 billion rebuilding Western Europe — reviving trade, undercutting communist parties, and binding allies to the U.S.
Berlin Airlift (1948–49)
When Stalin blockaded West Berlin, the U.S. supplied 2 million people by air for 11 months until he backed down.
NATO (1949)
The North Atlantic alliance — America's first peacetime military alliance; an attack on one was an attack on all.
NSC-68 (1950)
Called for massive rearmament against a global Soviet threat — militarizing containment after the Soviet bomb and China's fall.
'Fall' of China (1949)
Mao's communists won China's civil war; the shock fueled charges that Truman had 'lost China' and fed McCarthyism.
Korean War (1950–53)
North Korea's invasion brought U.S./UN intervention; China's entry produced stalemate near the 38th parallel — containment's first hot war.
Truman Fires MacArthur (1951)
MacArthur's public demands to widen the war got him dismissed — civilian control of the military affirmed.
Second Red Scare & McCarthyism
Fear of subversion — loyalty programs, HUAC, the Hollywood Ten, Hiss and Rosenberg cases — peaked in McCarthy's reckless accusations until his 1954 censure.
Massive Retaliation & Brinkmanship
Eisenhower-Dulles strategy: deter aggression with the threat of overwhelming nuclear response — cheaper than armies, terrifying by design.
Sputnik (1957)
The Soviet satellite shocked America into the space race, NASA, and federal education spending (NDEA).
U-2 Incident (1960)
A downed American spy plane wrecked a summit and embarrassed Eisenhower — Cold War distrust confirmed.
Military-Industrial Complex
Eisenhower's farewell warning against the 'unwarranted influence' of the permanent arms economy he had presided over.
Bay of Pigs (1961)
The CIA's exile invasion of Castro's Cuba failed disastrously, humiliating Kennedy and pushing Cuba toward Moscow.
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Thirteen days at the nuclear brink; Khrushchev withdrew missiles for a no-invasion pledge (and secret Turkey trade) — the Cold War's closest call.
Berlin Wall (1961)
East Germany walled in its people; Kennedy answered with 'Ich bin ein Berliner' — the divided city as Cold War symbol.
Vietnam — Origins
From aid to France, to backing Diem's South Vietnam after Geneva (1954), the U.S. slid into guaranteeing a fragile anticommunist state — the domino theory's logic.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)
After murky naval incidents, Congress gave LBJ a blank check for war — escalation without declaration.
Escalation & Attrition
By 1968, 536,000 U.S. troops fought a war of body counts against an enemy fighting for national unification — victory undefinable.
Tet Offensive (1968)
The communists' countrywide assault failed militarily but shattered U.S. official optimism — the war's credibility gap became a chasm.
Antiwar Movement
Teach-ins, draft resistance, and mass marches divided the nation; 1968's assassinations and Chicago convention chaos marked the breaking point.
Vietnamization & Nixon's War
Nixon withdrew ground troops while bombing heavily and invading Cambodia (1970 — Kent State protests); Paris Accords (1973) ended U.S. combat; Saigon fell in 1975.
War Powers Act (1973)
Congress's attempt to reclaim war-making authority — limiting presidential troop commitments after Vietnam's blank checks.
Détente
Nixon-Kissinger's relaxation: the opening to China (1972), SALT I arms limits with Moscow — triangular diplomacy replacing crusade.
GI Bill (1944)
College tuition and home loans for veterans — a middle-class escalator that fueled postwar suburbia and university expansion.
Postwar Boom
1945–1970: sustained growth, rising real wages, and mass consumption made the American middle class — with pockets of poverty amid abundance.
Levittown & Suburbia
Mass-produced suburbs housed the baby boom; racially restrictive covenants and redlining kept them overwhelmingly white.
Baby Boom
~76 million births (1946–64) reshaped schools, markets, and — when the cohort hit adolescence — the culture of the 1960s.
The Sun Belt
Population and industry shifted South and West — defense plants, air conditioning, and low taxes remapping political power.
Interstate Highway Act (1956)
41,000 miles of federal highways — commerce, suburbia, and car culture paved into permanence.
Consumer Culture & TV
Television conquered the living room in a decade, selling conformity, brands, and shared national experience.
Critics of Conformity
The Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac), 'The Lonely Crowd,' and rock and roll dissented from gray-flannel sameness.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
The Warren Court unanimously struck down school segregation — 'separate is inherently unequal' — overturning Plessy.
Massive Resistance
The white South answered Brown with defiance — the Southern Manifesto, closed schools, and the Little Rock crisis (1957) requiring the 101st Airborne.
Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56)
Rosa Parks's arrest sparked a year-long boycott that broke bus segregation and raised Martin Luther King Jr. to leadership.
MLK & Nonviolent Direct Action
King fused Christian love, Gandhian nonviolence, and mass protest — filling jails to expose injustice and force federal action.
Sit-ins & SNCC (1960)
Greensboro's students launched a sit-in wave; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became the movement's youth vanguard.
Freedom Rides (1961)
Integrated buses rode into Southern mobs to force enforcement of desegregation rulings — federal protection came only after burning buses.
Birmingham & the Children's Crusade (1963)
Bull Connor's dogs and fire hoses, televised, sickened the nation; King wrote the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.'
March on Washington (1963)
250,000 heard King's 'I Have a Dream' — the movement's moral high tide pressing for the civil rights bill.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Banned segregation in public accommodations and employment discrimination — Jim Crow's legal death blow.
Freedom Summer & Selma
Mississippi's 1964 voter drive (three workers murdered) and Selma's 1965 'Bloody Sunday' march forced the voting-rights breakthrough.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Federal oversight and the end of literacy tests transformed Southern politics — Black registration soared.
Malcolm X & Black Power
Malcolm's Black nationalism, then Carmichael's 'Black Power' and the Panthers, challenged integrationist nonviolence — pride, self-defense, and community control.
Urban Uprisings (1965–68)
Watts, Newark, Detroit — Northern ghettos exploded over policing, housing, and jobs; the Kerner Commission blamed 'two societies, separate and unequal.'
King's Assassination (1968)
Murdered in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers — the movement's martyrdom amid a violent year.
JFK's New Frontier
Kennedy's cautious domestic program — tax cuts proposed, space race embraced ('to the moon'), civil rights bill introduced late — cut short at Dallas (Nov 22, 1963).
LBJ's Great Society
Johnson's torrent of liberal legislation: civil rights, Medicare/Medicaid, aid to education, immigration reform, environmental and consumer laws.
War on Poverty
Economic Opportunity Act, Head Start, food stamps, Job Corps — poverty fell sharply, though Vietnam starved the effort.
Medicare & Medicaid (1965)
Health insurance for the elderly and poor — the Great Society's most durable monuments.
Immigration Act of 1965
Abolished national-origins quotas — reopening immigration and remaking American demography from Asia and Latin America.
Warren Court Revolution
Rights expanded: Gideon (counsel), Miranda (warnings), Baker v. Carr ('one person, one vote'), Engel (school prayer), Griswold (privacy).
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Betty Friedan named suburban women's 'problem that has no name' — igniting second-wave feminism; NOW founded 1966.
Second-Wave Feminism
Equal pay, Title IX (1972), Roe v. Wade (1973), and the ERA fight — liberation contested by Schlafly's STOP ERA counter-movement.
Chicano, AIM & Gay Liberation
Chávez and Huerta's farmworkers, the American Indian Movement (Wounded Knee 1973), and Stonewall (1969) — the rights revolution multiplied.
Counterculture
Hippies, Woodstock, and 'don't trust anyone over thirty' — a youth revolt against materialism and the war, commercialized almost instantly.
Silent Majority & Backlash
Nixon courted voters weary of protest, riots, and busing — the New Deal coalition cracking along race and culture lines.
Southern Strategy
Republican appeals to white Southern discontent with civil rights realigned the region over a generation.
Environmentalism
Carson's Silent Spring (1962), the first Earth Day (1970), EPA, Clean Air and Water Acts — ecology entered politics.
Watergate (1972–74)
The break-in, the cover-up, the tapes: facing impeachment, Nixon resigned (Aug 1974) — 'our long national nightmare' and its lesson that no one is above the law.
Stagflation & Oil Shocks
1970s stagnation plus inflation — OPEC's 1973 embargo and 1979 shock — ended the postwar boom and liberal confidence.
Ford & Carter
Ford's Nixon pardon and 'WIN' buttons; Carter's malaise-era honesty, Camp David Accords triumph, and the Iran hostage crisis (1979–81) that broke his presidency.
Roe v. Wade (1973)
The Court found abortion within the right of privacy — igniting a mobilizing battle that reshaped both parties.
Taft-Hartley Act (1947)
Rolled back Wagner: banned closed shops, allowed state right-to-work laws, required anticommunist oaths — labor's postwar ceiling.
Truman's Fair Deal
Truman's extension of the New Deal — national health insurance and civil rights proposals mostly blocked by the conservative coalition.
Desegregation of the Military (1948)
Truman's Executive Order 9981 ended armed-forces segregation — civil rights by presidential pen, tested in Korea.
Dixiecrats (1948)
Southern Democrats bolted over civil rights behind Strom Thurmond — the first crack in the Solid South.
Election of 1948
'Dewey Defeats Truman' — except he didn't; Truman's whistle-stop upset held the New Deal coalition one more time.
Hydrogen Bomb & Arms Race
The 1952 H-bomb and Soviet reply escalated to city-killing weapons; both sides built thousands — deterrence by overkill.
Eisenhower's 'Dynamic Conservatism'
Ike trimmed but accepted the New Deal ('should any party attempt to abolish Social Security... you would not hear of that party again').
CIA Covert Actions — Iran & Guatemala
Coups in Iran (1953, restoring the Shah) and Guatemala (1954) made covert regime change a Cold War tool — with long blowback.
Suez Crisis (1956)
Ike forced Britain, France, and Israel to abandon their Egypt invasion — America displacing old empires in the Middle East.
Eisenhower Doctrine (1957)
Pledged force against communist aggression in the Middle East — Lebanon intervention followed (1958).
Hungarian Uprising (1956)
Soviet tanks crushed Hungary's revolt while the West watched — 'liberation' rhetoric exposed as words.
Kitchen Debate (1959)
Nixon and Khrushchev sparred in a model American kitchen — consumer abundance as Cold War argument.
Emmett Till (1955)
The Chicago teenager lynched in Mississippi; his mother's open-casket funeral seared the nation and steeled the movement.
Little Rock Nine (1957)
Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort nine Black students past Faubus's mob — federal power enforcing Brown.
Greensboro & the Sit-In Wave (1960)
Four freshmen at a Woolworth counter ignited student direct action across the South within weeks.
Ella Baker
The organizer's organizer — midwife of SNCC, apostle of grassroots leadership over charismatic hierarchy.
Fannie Lou Hamer & the MFDP
The sharecropper-turned-organizer whose 1964 convention testimony ('I question America') exposed the Democrats' compromise with Jim Crow.
James Meredith & Ole Miss (1962)
Meredith's enrollment took federal marshals and troops through a deadly riot — massive resistance's last stand at the university gates.
Medgar Evers (1963)
Mississippi's NAACP leader assassinated in his driveway hours after JFK's civil rights address.
Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing)
Passed days after King's murder — banning housing discrimination, the movement's last legislative monument.
Peace Corps & Alliance for Progress
Kennedy's idealist counterinsurgency — development aid as Cold War strategy.
Space Race & Apollo 11 (1969)
From Sputnik shock to 'one giant leap' — the moon landing as Cold War triumph and technological watershed.
Bay of Tonkin to My Lai
The 1968 My Lai massacre — hundreds of civilians murdered, exposed in 1969 — became the war's moral indictment.
Pentagon Papers (1971)
Leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, the secret history revealed decades of official deception on Vietnam; the Court refused prior restraint.
26th Amendment (1971)
Lowered the voting age to 18 — 'old enough to fight, old enough to vote.'
Nixon's Domestic Surprises
EPA, OSHA, Clean Air Act, affirmative-action plans — a conservative president governing left of his rhetoric.
Wage-Price Controls & the Gold Window (1971)
Nixon froze wages and prices and ended dollar-gold convertibility — Bretton Woods' end and stagflation's overture.
OPEC Embargo (1973)
Oil as weapon after the Yom Kippur War: quadrupled prices, gas lines, and the end of cheap-energy America.
Church Committee (1975)
Senate exposure of CIA/FBI abuses — assassination plots, COINTELPRO — produced intelligence oversight and deepened distrust.
Busing Wars
Court-ordered busing for school integration ignited furious resistance — Boston's 1974 violence showing the North's own color line.
Bakke v. UC (1978)
The Court barred racial quotas but allowed race as one admissions factor — affirmative action's ambiguous charter.
Three Mile Island (1979)
The nuclear near-disaster froze reactor construction and fed environmental anxiety.
Camp David Accords (1978)
Carter brokered Egypt-Israel peace — his presidency's shining achievement.
Iran Hostage Crisis (1979–81)
Fifty-two Americans held 444 days; the failed desert rescue and nightly countdown broke Carter's presidency.