INTERWAR & WWII
This symbolic 1928 international agreement was signed by nations promising to renounce war as an instrument of national policy.
What is the Kellogg-Briand Pact?
First tested in Greece and Turkey with a request for $400 million, this foreign policy doctrine pledged U.S. aid to any nation resisting "totalitarian" subjugation.
What is the Truman Doctrine?
Officially named the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, this law restructuring the American class system by providing veterans with low-interest mortgages and college tuition.
What is the GI Bill?
President Eisenhower asserted federal supremacy over state-level nullification in 1957 by deploying the 101st Airborne Division to protect Black students in this crisis.
What is the Little Rock Nine Crisis?
This ambitious domestic agenda by Lyndon B. Johnson included Medicare, Medicaid, and the "War on Poverty."
What is the Great Society?
Held from 1921 to 1922, this conference marked the first international attempt to limit military build-ups and establish global naval armaments ratios.
What is the Washington Naval Conference?
This $13 billion economic recovery program was designed to stabilize European markets and prevent the economic desperation that favored communist expansion.
What is the Marshall Plan?
This demographic trend saw millions of affluent white families abandon deteriorating urban centers for brand-new mass-produced residential communities.
What is "white flight" (or suburbanization)?
Launched by CORE and SNCC in 1961, these direct-action demonstrations deliberately tested Southern compliance with Supreme Court bans on interstate transit segregation.
What were the Freedom Rides?
This 1964 congressional resolution acted as a "blank check," allowing the president to expand military operations in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.
What is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?
This 1941 legislative act officially ended strict U.S. neutrality by authorizing the president to supply military aid to Allied nations.
What is the Lend-Lease Act?
This congressional body became infamous during the Second Red Scare for aggressively investigating alleged communist subversion within the entertainment industry and academia.
What is HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee)?
This generation of 1950s writers and artists loudly rejected mainstream middle-class social conformity, consumerism, and corporate values.
Who were the Beats (or the Beat Generation)?
In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leveled his sharpest critique against this specific group, calling them a greater barrier to freedom than the KKK.
Who are white moderates?
Though a military defeat for the Viet Cong, this massive 1968 synchronized offensive shattered American public confidence and opened a deep "credibility gap."
What was the Tet Offensive?
This wartime initiative was launched by African Americans to demand victory over fascism abroad and victory over structural racism at home.
What is the Double V Campaign?
This U.S. diplomat outlined the foundational strategy of "containment" in his famous 1946 "Long Telegram."
Who was George Kennan?
This system of segregation is maintained through active legal statutes, such as the Jim Crow codes of the American South.
What is de jure segregation?
This historic 1963 mass demonstration was "co-opted" by the political establishment to dilute its radical economic demands.
What was the March on Washington?
This 1973 law was passed over a presidential veto to limit the executive branch's ability to wage undeclared overseas wars and reassert legislative oversight.
What is the War Powers Act?
This legal mechanism, signed by President Roosevelt following the attack on Pearl Harbor, resulted in the forced relocation and internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans.
What is Executive Order 9066?
The domestic anti-communism of the Second Red Scare served this primary political function.
What is maintaining domestic stability by creating a foreign threat / shifting politics strictly to the corporate center? (Accept answers mentioning silencing critiques of capitalism/corporate power).
This form of segregation operates not by law, but through societal custom, economic reality, and real estate practices like redlining in the North and West.
What is de facto segregation?
This landmark 1965 piece of federal legislation banned literacy tests and authorized federal oversight of voter registration across the South.
What is the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
This economic term defined the 1970s financial crisis, describing the paradoxical combination of high unemployment and stagnant growth with rampant inflation.
What is stagflation?