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Jonas Salk
Jonas Edward Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. -
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. -
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, from African American musical styles such as gospel, jump blues, jazz, boogie woogie, and rhythm and blues. along with country music. While elements of rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until 1954. -
G.I. Bill
G.I. Bill (of Rights), also called Servicemen's Readjustment Act, U.S. legislation passed in 1944 that provided benefits to World War II veterans. -
The Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $13 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
baby boom generation
The term "Baby Boom" is used to identify a massive increase in births following World War II. Baby boomers are those people born worldwide between 1946 and 1964, the time frame most commonly used to define them. The first baby boomers reached the standard retirement age of 65 in 2011. -
Containment Policy
Containment was a United States policy using numerous strategies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge its communist sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam. -
truman doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was first announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 and further developed on July 12, 1948 when he pledged to contain threats to Greece and Turkey. -
cold war
The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Western Allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutsche mark from West Berlin. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. -
Mccarthyism
a vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the period 1950–54. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not in fact belong to the Communist Party.
a campaign or practice that endorses the use of unfair allegations and investigations. -
1950's prosperity
The Decade of Prosperity. The economy overall grew by 37% during the 1950s. ... Inflation, which had wreaked havoc on the economy immediately after World War II, was minimal, in part because of Eisenhower's persistent efforts to balance the federal budget. -
rust belt vs sun belt
The post-war period, from the 1950s through the 1980s, was characterized by the migration of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the Northern and Midwestern Rust Belt to the Southern Sun Belt. -
Levittown
Levitt remained the nation's largest home builder through most of the 1950s. In 1998, Time again recognized Levitt's significance, calling his developments "as much an achievement of [their] cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem." Critics, though, linked Levittown with the beginnings of suburban sprawl. -
Beatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype prevalent throughout the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s. -
Rosenburg trial
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were United States citizens who spied for the Soviet Union and were tried, convicted and executed by the United States government. -
Domino Theory
the theory that a political event in one country will cause similar events in neighboring countries, like a falling domino causing an entire row of upended dominoes to fall. -
Dwight D Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American army general and statesman who served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. -
ray kroc
was an American businessman. He joined the California company McDonald's in 1954, just a few months after the McDonald brothers had branched out from their original 1940 operation in San Bernardino, with Kroc turning the chain into a nationwide and eventually global franchise, making it the most successful fast food corporation in the world. Controversially, Kroc would present himself as the founder of McDonald's during his later life. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. -
interstate highway act
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. It took several years of wrangling, but a new Federal-Aid Highway Act passed in June 1956. The law authorized the construction of a 41,000-mile network of interstate highways that would span the nation. -
sputnik
Sputnik was the world's first artificial satellite, launched Oct. 4, 1957. Fifty-five years ago today, the Space Race was kicked into gear by a silver basketball flying through the sky. Sputnik 1, the Soviet probe that became the first manmade object to reach space, launched Oct. 4, 1957. -
space race
The Space Race refers to the 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for dominance in spaceflight capability. -
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy, commonly referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. -
bay of pigs
On April 17, 1961, 1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. -
cuban missile crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson, often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969, assuming the office after having served as the 37th Vice President of the United States from 1961 to 1963. A Democrat from Texas, he also served as a United States Representative and as the Majority Leader in the United States Senate. Johnson is one of only four people who have served in all four federal elected positions. -
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan, née Bettye Naomi Goldstein, (born February 4, 1921, Peoria, Illinois, U.S.—died February 4, 2006, Washington, D.C.), American feminist best known for her book The Feminine Mystique (1963), which explored the causes of the frustrations of modern women in traditional roles. -
anti war movement
An anti-war movement (also antiwar) is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. -
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub.L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. -
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The main goal was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. -
Vietnamization
Vietnamization of the war was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops. -
The Tet Offensive, 1968
U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive, 1968. In late January, 1968, during the lunar new year (or “Tet”) holiday, North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated attack against a number of targets in South Vietnam. -
moon landing
the lunar landings transfixed the whole globe. Previously the idea of landing on the moon had been the stuff of science fiction. But, in a seeming short space of time, man had enabled huge strides in technology which enabled the seemingly impossible to become reality. -
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was an American politician who served as the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 until 1974, when he resigned from office, the only U.S. president to do so. -
26th amendment
The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old. -
War Powers Act
The War Powers Resolution (also known as the War Powers Resolution of 1973 or the War Powers Act) (50 U.S.C. 1541–1548) is a federal law intended to check the president's power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of the U.S. Congress.
