| Mccarthyism | making or threatening to make public accusations of disloyalty without offering evidence, as done by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s |
| Fair Deal | President Truman-A national health insurance plan. Federal aid to education. Abolition of poll taxes and other practices intended to prevent racial minorities from voting. A major tax cut for low-income workers. Expanded Social Security coverage. |
| Red Scare | Communism in the form of the Soviet Union—a communist, rival country which had proven itself a viable military threat through its nuclear weapons program—as well as an ideology itself instilled fear in Americans, especially since the US has always promoted democracy and capitalism; |
| Joseph McCarthy | U.S. senator who lent his name to the term McCarthyism. McCarthy dominated the U.S. political climate in the early 1950s through his sensational but unproven charges of communist subversion in high government circles. |
| Containment | policy of “containing” Soviet expansion. NSC-68 recommended that the United States embark on rapid military expansion of conventional forces and the nuclear arsenal, including the development of the new hydrogen bomb. |
| Security State and what we do | seek to protect the United States and its allies from Soviet land and air attacks, maintain lines of communications, and enhance the technical superiority of the United States |
| The Hollywood Ten | 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress |
| Communism | ommunism is an economic system in which the distribution of property and resources is primarily controlled by the government. |
| Conformity | a person's desire to fit in with a social group can interfere with the ability to make moral or safe decisions. |
| Arms Race | a competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons, especially between the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. |
| Space Race | A competition between bitter Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, the Space Race involved the fight for supremacy to put the first craft into space. |
| Iron Curtain | the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. |
| Truman Doctrine | an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. |
| domino theory | suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a perfectly aligned row of dominos |
| korean war | the war, begun on June 25, 1950, between North Korea, aided by Communist China, and South Korea, aided by the United States and other United Nations members forming a United Nations armed force: truce signed July 27, 1953. |
| Marshall Plan | a plan for aiding the European nations in economic recovery after World War II, proposed by U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall in 1947 |
| Berlin Airlift | A military operation in the late 1940s that brought food and other needed goods into West Berlin by air after the government of East Germany, which at that time surrounded West Berlin (see Berlin wall) (see also Berlin wall), had cut off its supply routes. The United States joined with western European nations in flying the supplies in. The airlift was one of the early events of the cold war. |
| CIA | Central Intelligence Agency: the U.S. federal agency that coordinates governmental intelligence activities outside the United States. |
| GI Bill | a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s). The original G.I. Bill expired in 1956, but the term "G.I. Bill" is still used to refer to programs created to assist U.S. military veterans. |
| Baby Boom | used to identify a massive increase in births following World War II. Baby boomers are those people born worldwide between 1946 and 1964, |
| Cold War | he state of political hostility that existed between the Soviet bloc countries and the US-led Western powers from 1945 to 1990. |
| CIA and Intervention in 1950s | a spy agency, it engaged in espionage. Second, it undertook other covert operations around the world to try to undermine governments that sympathized with the Soviet Union. The CIA was and is an intelligence agency. |
| M.A.D. | Mutual(ly) assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender |
| Desegregation of Military | It abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. |
| Consumerism | the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers. "the growth of consumerism has led to many organizations improving their service to the customer" |
| Materialism | a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. |
| Rock and Roll (Elvis) | is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s[1][2] from musical styles such as gospel, jump blues, jazz, boogie woogie, and rhythm and blues,[3] and country music.[4] While elements of what was to become rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s[5] and in country records of the 1930s,[4] the genre did not acquire its name until 1954.[6][7] |
| Automania (benefits and drawbacks) | "Automania" In the 1950s , Americans bought cars in record numbers . ... The more cars there were , the more roads were needed . Auto-mania spurred local and state government to construct roads linking the major cities while connecting schools . |
| Operation Pedro Pan | Operation Peter Pan was a mass exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors to the United States between 1960 and 1962. Father Bryan O. Walsh of the Catholic Welfare Bureau created the program to provide air transportation to the United States for Cuban children. |
| Beginning of Civil Rights | The civil rights movement in the United States was a decades-long struggle by African Americans to end legalized racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States. Wikipedia Period: 1954 – 1968 |
| Sexism | prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. |
| Racism | prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. |
| Suburbs | Most people resorted to homes outside the cities like suburbs because there it was cheaper. ... Over the next couple of years suburbs became very popular and helped the government to give GI bills to the veterans of World War II and the Korean War. They helped them with the mortgage and college. |
| Levittown | is the name of seven large suburban housing developments created in the United States by William J Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. |
| Beatnik | a young person in the 1950s and early 1960s belonging to a subculture associated with the beat generation. |
| H.U.A.C. | The United States government responded by creating the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was charged with identifying Communist threats to the United States. |
| Fear of Communism | Fearing the spread of communism, the United States not only sat defensively, but also took an offensive position in the fight against the spread of communism. The United States put into action the Economic Recovery Plan 1947, also known as the Marshall Plan. This plan sent billions towards reconstruction of Western European economies in hope that economic stability would translate to political stability. As the policy continued to be exercised, a new fear began to form with the start of the Korean war. The paranoia began to rise with the possibility that the “Soviet-directed aggression” in Korea was just a distraction meant to pull the attention of the United States away from Western Europe and towards the East, leaving Europe vulnerable to the Soviets and a possible invasion. However, the Marshall plan succeeded in rebuilding the economies of Western Europe, therefore strengthening their political structures and preventing them from falling to communist takeovers . |
