In American government, the claim that certain information known to the president or the executive branch of government should be unavailable to Congress or the courts because of the principle of separation of powers.
What is executive privilege?
100
A moderate and short-term economic downturn, less severe than a depression.
What is a recession?
100
A Washington office complex whose name was applied to the widespread corruption and crimes of the Nixon administration.
What is Watergate?
100
Powerful new federal agency established to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other similar laws.
What is the EPA?
100
Supreme Court decision that declared women’s right to choose abortion.
What is Roe v. Wade?
200
Physical symbol of the Cold War and divided Europe that came down in 1989.
What is the Berlin Wall?
200
Nixon’s policy of withdrawing American troops from Vietnam, while providing aid for the South Vietnamese to fight the war.
What is Vietnamization?
200
The Ohio university where four students were killed during protests against the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.
What is Kent State?
200
Term for young urban professionals of the 1980s who flaunted their wealth through conspicuous consumer spending.
What are yuppies?
200
The first appointed vice president of the United States who became the first unelected president.
Who is Gerald Ford?
300
The political system, typical of modern industrial societies, in which government assumes responsibility for the economic well-being of its citizens by providing social benefits.
What is a Welfare State?
300
Top-secret documents, published by the New York Times in 1971, that showed the blunders and deceptions that led the United States into the Vietnam War.
What are the Pentagon Papers?
300
The law, passed in reaction to the secret Cambodia bombing, that restricted presidential use of troops overseas without congressional authorization.
What is the War Powers Act?
300
Nixon-Ford-Kissinger policy of seeking relaxed tensions with the Soviet Union through trade and arms limitation.
What is detente?
300
Political activists and thinkers, mostly former liberals, who turned to a defense of traditional social and moral values and a strongly anticommunist foreign policy in the 1970s and 1980s.
What are Neoconservatives?
400
The twin policies of openness and restructuring by which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the Communist system.
What is Glasnost and Perestroika?
400
The leftist revolutionary rulers of Nicaragua, strongly opposed by the Reagan administration.
What are Sandinistas?
400
Right-wing rebels against radical Nicaraguan government, secretly funded by profits of U.S. arms sales to Iran.
Who are the Contras?
400
The action by Iranian revolutionary militants that aroused worldwide outrage and further crippled Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
What is the Iranian Hostage Crisis?
400
The scandal, carried out by Reagan administration officials, in which weapons were sold to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, the profits used to fund Nicaraguan rebels.
What is the Iran-Contra Affair?
500
The nickname given for Reagan’s proposed space-based nuclear defense system.
What is "Star Wars?"
500
Code name for the military operation of the hundred-hour war that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
What is Operation Desert Storm?
500
Leading organization of the new religious right, led by Reverend Jerry Falwell.
What is the Moral Majority?
500
The central location in Beijing, China, where demonstrators demanding greater freedom and democracy were brutally crushed by government tanks in spring 1989.
What is Tiananmen Square?
500
California ballot initiative of 1978 that set the stage for the tax revolt that Reagan rode to victory in 1980.