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Question 1

Great Society

Answer 1

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic program, which included civil rights legislation, antipoverty programs, government subsidy of medical care, federal aid to education, consumer protection, and aid to the arts and humanities.

Question 2

The Feminine Mystique

Answer 2

The title of an influential book written in 1963 by Betty Friedan critiquing the ideal whereby women were encouraged to confine themselves to roles within the domestic
sphere.

Question 3

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Answer 3

Resolution passed by Congress in 1964 in the wake of a naval confrontation between the United States and North Vietnam. It gave the president virtually unlimited authority in conducting the Vietnam War. The Senate terminated the resolution in 1971 following outrage over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

Question 4

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Answer 4

An organization for social change founded by college students in 1960.

Question 5

New Left

Answer 5

A term applied to radical students of the 1960s and 1970s, distinguishing their activism from the Old Left — the communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s who tended to focus on economic and labor questions rather than cultural issues.

Question 6

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)

Answer 6

The largest student political organization in the country, whose conservative members defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam.

Question 7

counterculture

Answer 7

A culture embracing values or lifestyles opposing those of the mainstream culture. Became synonymous with hippies, people who opposed and rejected conventional standards of society and advocated extreme liberalism in their sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles.

Question 8

Tet offensive

Answer 8

Major campaign of attacks launched throughout South Vietnam in January 1968 by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. A major turning point in the war, it exposed the credibility gap between official statements and the war’s reality, and it shook Americans’ confidence in the government.

Question 9

women’s liberation

Answer 9

A new brand of feminism in the 1960s that attracted primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements who sought to end to the denigration and exploitation of women.

Question 10

Title IX

Answer 10

A law passed by Congress in 1972 that broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, it made women’s athletics a real presence on college campuses.

Question 11

Stonewall Inn

Answer 11

A two-day riot after the police raided the gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1969; the event contributed to the rapid rise of a gay liberation movement.

Question 12

silent majority

Answer 12

Term derived from the title of a book by Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard Scammon (called The Real Majority) and used by Nixon in a 1969 speech to describe those who supported his positions but did not publicly assert their voices, in contrast to those involved in the antiwar, civil rights, and women’s movements.

Question 13

Vietnamization

Answer 13

A new U.S. policy, devised under President Nixon in the early 1970s, of delegating the ground fighting to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. American troop levels dropped and American casualties dropped correspondingly, but the killing in Vietnam continued.

Question 14

My Lai

Answer 14

The 1968 execution by U.S. Army troops of nearly five hundred people in the South Vietnamese village, including a large number of women and children.

Question 15

stagflation

Answer 15

An economic term coined in the 1970s to describe the condition in which inflation and unemployment rise at the same time.

Question 16

deindustrialization

Answer 16

The dismantling of manufacturing — especially in the automobile, steel, and consumer-goods industries — in the decades after World War II, representing a reversal of the process of industrialization that had dominated the American economy from the 1870s through the 1940s.

Question 17

Watergate

Answer 17

Term referring to the 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., by men working for President Nixon’s reelection campaign, along with Nixon’s efforts to cover it up. This scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation.

Question 18

War Powers Act

Answer 18

A law that limited the president’s ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval. Congress passed this act in 1973 as a series of laws to fight the abuses of the Nixon administration.

Question 19

deregulation

Answer 19

The limiting of regulation by federal agencies. Deregulation of prices in the trucking, airline, and railroad industries had begun under President Carter in the late 1970s, and Reagan expanded it to include cutting back on government protections of consumers, workers, and the environment.

Question 20

affirmative action

Answer 20

Policies established in the 1960s and 1970s governments, businesses, universities, and other institutions to overcome the effects of past discrimination against specific groups such as racial and ethnic minorities and women. Measures to ensure equal opportunity include setting goals for the admission, hiring, and promotion of minorities; considering minority status when allocating resources; and actively encouraging victims of past discrimination to apply for jobs and other resources.

Question 21

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

Answer 21

Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in 1972 that would require equal treatment of men and women under federal and state law. Facing fierce opposition from the New Right and the Republican Party, the ERA was defeated as time ran out for state ratification in 1982.

Question 22

Roe v. Wade

Answer 22

The 1973 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution protects the right to abortion, which states cannot prohibit in the early stages of pregnancy. The decision galvanized social conservatives and made abortion a controversial policy issue for decades to come.

Question 23

evangelicalism

Answer 23

The trend in Protestant Christianity that stresses salvation through conversion, repentance of sin, and adherence to scripture; it also stresses the importance of preaching over ritual.