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The Cold War: The Red Scare
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted.And liberal college professors lost their jobs. -
The Cold War: The Atomic Age
First H-bomb test was in Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. -
Civil Rights Movements: Jim Crow Laws
“Jim Crow” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Blacks couldn’t use the same public facilities as whites, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most blacks couldn’t vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests. -
Vietnam War Begins
The North Vietnamese government and the VIet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud. -
The Cold War: War Extends to Space
the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. -
The Cold War Abroad
President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World” Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. -
The Vietnam War: Domino Theory
Domino Theory governed much of U.S. foreign policy held that a communist victory in one nation would quickly lead to a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighboring states. -
Kennedy's Assassination
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. He was shot in the head as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions. It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966. -
Vietnam War Protests
physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers increased, both volunteers and draftees, including drug use, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers. more than 503,000 U.S. military personnel deserted, and a robust anti-war movement among American forces spawned violent protests, killings and mass incarcerations of personnel stationed in Vietnam as well as within the United States. -
The Vietnam War: Kent State Shooting
at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police.
