Money Matters
Also known as the European Recovery Plan, this American aid package brought $13 billion to war-ravaged western Europe.
What is the Marshall Plan?
The first human-made earth-orbiting satellite launched in October 1957.
What is Sputnik?
The 1972 law that requires universities to support male and female athletic programs at equal levels.
What is Title IX?
The “war on terror” began here in October 2001.
What is the Afghan war?
Gorbachev-initiated restructuring of the Soviet Union’s command economy.
What is perestroika?
Supported by both the Bush and Obama administrations, this legislation spent $750 billion shoring up in-danger-of-failing financial institutions.
What is TARP?
Chemical pesticide discovered in 1939 whose first use was to stop the spread of typhus among American soldiers fighting Japan in the Pacific islands.
What is DDT?
Congress of Racial Equality-initiated trips on interstate buses beginning in 1961 aimed at desegregating bus terminals throughout the country.
What are freedom rides?
Disastrous attempt to dislodge Castro’s regime in Cuba only half-heartedly supported by the Kennedy administration.
What is the Bay of Pigs invasion?
Mexican contract laborers brought to the U.S. to meet labor needs during World War II.
What are braceros?
A puzzling mix of rising unemployment, high inflation, and slowing economic growth first experienced in 1974-1975.
What is stagflation?
German bombs used to attack London late in the war with devastating results but limited in overall effect due to production shortfalls.
What are V-2 rockets?
The beginnings of a push for civil rights for gay men and women that started with a police raid on a gay nightclub in Greenwich Village on June 27, 1969.
What are the Stonewall Riots?
Reagan’s most damaging political scandal that began with an attempt to get Iran to help achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon.
What is the Iran-contra scandal?
An offshoot of SDS, this group of radicals initiated bombings of public buildings to protest the war in Vietnam.
What is the “Weathermen”?
War-time department that attempted to control inflation despite significant overcharging and an active black market in rationed goods.
What is the Office of Price Administration?
Complete identification and classification of human DNA funded by the federal government and completed in 2003.
What is the Human Genome Project?
Passed by Congress and sent to the states in 1972, this proposed change to the Constitution expired in 1982 without the necessary approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures.
What is the Equal Rights Amendment?
Issued in 1950, this report called for more aggressive application of the containment policy and a nearly four-fold increase in defense spending.
What is NSC-68?
JFK’s proposal of projects for peaceful development and stabilization of countries in Latin America.
What is the Alliance for Progress?
FDR’s communication to the 1933 World Economic Conference that the U.S. would not support attempts to stabilize world currencies.
What is the “Bombshell Message?"
The first programmable digital computer, it was used to decipher Enigma-encrypted German messages from June 1944 through the end of the war.
What is Colossus II?
This 1948 Supreme Court ruling stated that lower courts could not be used to enforce anti-black residential “covenants.”
What is Shelley v. Kraemer?
The first important Allied victory against the Empire of Japan in a battle off the northeast coast of Australia May 7-8, 1942.
What is the Battle of the Coral Sea?
The sinking of an American gunboat by the Japanese on the Yangtze River in December 1937 which was downplayed by the FDR administration due to rising isolationist sentiment.
What is the Panay incident?