Civil War Ends (?) Flashcards
(13 cards)
What does SALT stand for?
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. 1972 Talks between Pres Nixon and Secretary Brezhnev that limited the number of nuclear warheads each nation could possess and prohibited the development of missile defense systems.
What is détente?
Period of improving relations between the U.S. and Communist nations, particularly China and the Soviet Union, during the Nixon adm.
What was the My Lai Massacre?
Massacre of 374 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai by Lt. William Calley and troops under his command.
What are the Pentagon Papers?
Informal name for the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam conflict.
Leaked to the press by former official Daniel Ellsberg and published in the New York Times in 1971.
What was the Vietnam War?
A prolonged military conflict that started as an anti-colonial war against the French and evolved into a Cold War confrontation between international communism and free-market democracy.
What is Watergate?
Washington office and apartment complex that lent its name to the 1972-1974 scandal of the Nixon administration.
Nixon resigned the presidency under threat of impeachment.
What was the oil embargo?
Prohibition on trade in oil declared by OPEC, which dominated Middle Eastern oil producers, in October 1973 in response to U.S. and western European support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
What were the Helsinki Accords?
1975 agreement between the USSR and the U.S. that recognized the post-WWII boundaries of Europe and guaranteed the basic liberties of each nation’s citizens.
What were the Camp David Accords?
Peace agreement between the leaders of Israel and Egypt, brokered by Pres. Carter in 1978.
What is the Moral Majority?
An organization of Evangelical religious conservatives founded in 1979 to promote conservative social values.
What is the Reagan Revolution?
The rightward turn of American politics following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
What is Reaganomics?
Popular name for Pres. Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of ‘Supply-side’ economics combined tax cuts with an unregulated marketplace.
What was the Iran-Contra Affair?
Scandal of the second Reagan adm. involving sales of arms to Iran in partial exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon and the use of the arms money to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, which had been expressly forbidden by Congress.
