The Postwar Period & Cold War (1945–1980): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
134 flashcard terms for AP U.S. History Unit 8, written to match the course framework. Read them here, drill them as flashcards, or take the 53-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.
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.
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).
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').
Ended national-origins quotas, prioritizing family reunification and skills; reshaped US demography toward Asia and Latin America.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)
Gave LBJ broad war powers after disputed attacks; later repudiated by the War Powers Act (1973).
Tet Offensive (1968)
Militarily a communist failure but a political shock that undermined public faith in official optimism.
Silent Majority
Nixon's appeal to Americans alienated by protest and counterculture — the core of a conservative realignment.
Detente
Nixon-Kissinger easing of tensions: opening to China, SALT I, and triangular diplomacy.
Stagflation
1970s combination of high inflation and unemployment that discredited Keynesian assumptions.
Roe v. Wade (1973)
Recognized a constitutional right to abortion under privacy; galvanized the religious right.
Iran Hostage Crisis
444-day captivity of Americans (1979-81) that symbolized Carter's perceived weakness.
Bretton Woods System
The 1944 agreement pegging currencies to a gold-convertible dollar and creating the IMF and World Bank made the United States the anchor of postwar capitalism until Nixon ended convertibility in 1971.
Marshall Plan
About $13 billion in aid rebuilt western European economies, created markets for American goods, and made communist parties less attractive, all without direct military commitment.
Berlin Airlift (1948-49)
Supplying West Berlin by air for eleven months defeated the Soviet blockade without shooting, establishing containment as a policy of firm but calibrated response.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact
The first peacetime American entangling alliance in 1949 and its Soviet counterpart in 1955 froze Europe into two blocs and militarized containment.
GI Bill
Education benefits, job training, and home loans built the postwar middle class, but local administration and redlining left many Black veterans unable to use them fully.
Levittown and Suburbanization
Mass-produced housing plus federal mortgage insurance and highway spending drove suburban growth, while restrictive covenants kept most developments white.
McCarthyism
Senator McCarthy's unsubstantiated accusations of communist infiltration exploited genuine espionage cases to intimidate opponents until the 1954 Army hearings exposed his methods.
Point Four Program
Truman's technical assistance initiative extending development aid to poorer nations as a Cold War alternative to communist appeals.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Thirteen months of organized withdrawal by Black riders, sustained by churches and carpools and settled by a Supreme Court ruling, launched King into national leadership.
Little Rock Crisis (1957)
Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to enforce a desegregation order, establishing that federal authority would ultimately back Brown against open state defiance.
Deliberately provoking violent responses on filmed integrated bus trips and in Birmingham's streets forced federal intervention and shifted national opinion.
Redlining
Federal mortgage maps rating Black neighborhoods hazardous steered loans away from them for decades, building racial wealth gaps into the housing market.
Freedom Summer (1964)
A voter registration drive in Mississippi whose volunteers faced beatings and the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, forcing national attention.
Black Power
A shift toward self-determination, political and economic autonomy, and racial pride associated with SNCC after 1966 and the Black Panther Party's community programs.
Vietnamization
Nixon's policy of transferring ground combat to South Vietnamese forces while withdrawing American troops, combined with intensified bombing and the Cambodian incursion.
War Powers Resolution (1973)
Required the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing troops and to withdraw within 60 days absent authorization, an assertion of legislative control that presidents have resisted.
Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air Act
Nixon-era environmental regulation responded to Silent Spring, Earth Day, and visible pollution crises, showing reform continuing under a Republican administration.
Kerner Commission (1968)
Its report blamed urban unrest on white racism and structural inequality, warning that the nation was moving toward two separate and unequal societies.