History Final Flashcards

Question

What did the Atlantic Charter call for?

Answer 1

In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt met for four days on a British battleship off the coast of Newfoundland. The two leaders issued the Atlantic Charter, a set of war aims reminiscent of Wilsonianism: collective security, disarmament, self-determination, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas.

Answer 2

Since halting the Japanese advance in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, American strategy had been to “island-hop” toward Japan, skipping the most strongly fortified islands whenever possible and taking the weaker ones, aiming to strand the Japanese armies on their island outposts. To cut off supplies being shipped from Japan’s home islands, Americans also targeted the Japanese merchant marine.

Answer 3

The most important government-sponsored scientific research program was the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion secret effort to build an atomic bomb. Roosevelt had been convinced by scientists fleeing the Nazis in 1939 that Germany was working to create an atomic weapon, and he resolved to beat them. It achieved the world's first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

Answer 4

In March 1942, Roosevelt ordered that all 112000 foreign-born Japanese and Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and the state of Washington be removed from the West Coast to “relocation centers” for the duration of the war. They were imprisoned as a group, under suspicion solely because they were of Japanese descent. West Coast Japanese Americans also lost their positions in the truck-garden, floral, and fishing industries. The internees were sent to flood-damaged lands at Relocation, Arkansas; to the intermountain terrain of Wyoming and the desert of western Arizona. The camps were bleak and demoralizing. Behind barbed wire stood tar papered wooden barracks where entire families lived in a single furnished only with cots, blankets, and a bare light bulb. Toilets and dining and bathing facilities were communal; privacy was almost nonexistent. People nonetheless attempted to sustain community life, setting up schools for children and clubs for adults. Betrayed by their government, almost 6000 internees renounced US citizenship and demanded to be sent to Japan. Some sought legal remedy, but the Supreme Court upheld the government’s action in Korematsu vs. US (1944).

Answer 5

On March 12, 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey. In a statement that became known as the Truman Doctrine, he declared that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Congress agreed with Truman and decided that the doctrine was essential to keeping Soviet influence from spreading. The Eisenhower Doctrine promised the US would intervene in the Middle East if any government threatened by a communist takeover asked for help. Revolts against Soviet power erupted in Poland and Hungary, testing Khrushchev’s new permissiveness. After a new Hungarian government in 1956 announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, Soviet troops and tanks battled students and workers in the streets of Budapest and crushed the rebellion. Although the Eisenhower administration’s propaganda had been encouraging liberation efforts, US officials found themselves unable to aid the rebels without igniting a world war. They stood by, promising only to welcome Hungarian immigrants in greater numbers than American quota laws allowed.

Answer 6

The Berlin blockade increased Western European fear of Soviet aggression. As a result, ten Western European nations— Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal—joined with the United States and Canada on April 4, 1949, to form a defensive military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The 12 members of NATO pledged military support to one another in case any member was attacked. For the first time in its history, the United States had entered into a military alliance with other nations during peacetime.

Answer 7

Containment. The US began to build an international economic and defensive network to protect American prosperity and security, and to advance US hegemony. American diplomats pursued a range of objectives, including economic reconstruction and fostering a political environment friendly to the US. They sought the ouster of communists from governments.

Answer 8

Both the North’s leader (Kim Ilsung) and the South’s leader (Syngman Rhee) sought to reunify their nation. Displaying the Cold War mentality of the time, however, Truman claimed that the Soviets had masterminded the North Korean attack. The U.S. aim was not the complete and total defeat of the enemy, but rather the “limited” goal of protecting South Korea.

Answer 9

John Foster Dulles feared the communists would get the better of any agreement, yet in end the Vietminh received less than their dominant military position suggested they should. The 1954 Geneva accords, signed by France and Ho's Democratic Republic of Vietnam, temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The 17th parallel was meant to serve as a military truce line, not a national boundary; the country was scheduled to be reunified after national elections in 1956. Meanwhile, neither North nor South was to join a military alliance or permit foreign military bases on its soil. In August 1974, an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, drew Johnson's involvement. Twice in 3 days, US destroyers reported coming under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. Despite a lack of evidence of the second attack occurred, Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which gave the president authority to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the US and to prevent further aggression." In doing so, Congress essentially gave up its warmaking powers to the executive branch.

Answer 10

Winston Churchill said that the Soviets erected an "iron curtain" that had cut off eastern European countries from the West.

Answer 11

Dulles said that he considered containment too defensive a stance toward communism. “Massive retaliation” was the administration’s plan for the nuclear obliteration of the Soviet state or its assumed client, China, if either one took aggressive actions. The ability of the US to make such a threat was thought to provide “deterrence,” the prevention of hostile Soviet behavior. Backed by its huge military arsenal, the US could practice “brinkmanship”: not backing down in a crisis, even if it meant taking the nation to the brink of war.

Answer 12

Leading the anticommunist crusade was the House Un-American Activites (HUAC). University professors became targets. The anticommunist crusade was embraced by labor unions officials, religious leaders, and the media, as well as politicians. Most public figures found it too risky to stand up against McCarthyist tactics. And most democrats did support the Cold War and its anticommunist actions.

Answer 13

Economic growth was also fueled by government programs, such as the GI Bill of Rights, which pumped money into the economy. By 1949, veterans had received close to $4 billion in unemployment compensation. But the GI Bill did more than help forestall economic collapse. It offered veterans low-interest loans to buy a house or start a business, and stipends to cover college or technical school tuition and living expenses. With GI benefits, almost half of America's returning veterans sough some form of higher education. The bill also created social mobility and fostered the emergence of a national middle-class culture.

Answer 14

Condemning the new "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry," Eisenhower warned, "The total influence---economic, political, even spiritual---is felt in every city, every office of the federal government" and threatened the nation's democratic process. He urged Americans to "guard against...the military-industrial complex."

Answer 15

As he gained a following, the brilliant thinker and engaging speaker openly preached Elijah Muhammad’s views that whites were the cause of the black condition and that blacks should separate from white society. At a New York press conference in March 1964, he also advocated armed self-defense. In March 1964, Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad over differences in strategy and doctrine and formed another Muslim organization. One month later, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, a trip required of followers of orthodox Islam. When he returned to the United States, his attitude toward whites had changed radically. He explained his new slogan, “Ballots or bullets,” to a follower: “Well, if you and I don’t use the ballot, we’re going to be forced to use the bullet. So let us try the ballot.”

Answer 16

In October 1962, a U-2 plane flying over Cuba photographed the missile sites. The president immediately organized a special Executive Committee of advisers to find a way to force the missiles and their nuclear warheads out of Cuba. A naval quarantine was used. Khrushchev said that the missiles would be removed if the US pledged to never attack Cuba and to remove the Jupiter missiles aimed at the Soviet Union in Turkey.

Answer 17

Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by American confrontations with the Soviet Union, manifested by proxy contests in the global state of the Cold War. Like his two predecessors, Kennedy adopted the policy of containment, which purported to stop the spread of Communism. Johnson pursued conciliatory policies with the Soviet Union, but stopping well short of the détente policy Richard Nixon introduced in the 1970s.

Answer 18

in the 1978 Supreme Court decision Regents of the University of California v Bakke. Allan Bakke, a white man with a strong academic record, had been denied admission to the medical school. He sued, charging he had been denied “equal protection” of the law because the medical school’s affirmative-action program reserved 16 percent of its slots for racial minority candidates, who were held to lower standards than other applicants. The case set off furious debates nationwide over the legitimacy of affirmative action. In 1978 the Supreme Court decided in favor of Bakke. Four justices argued that any race-based decision violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They still upheld the policy of affirmative-action.

Answer 19

NOW and other women’s organizations worked together to promote an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would end all discriminatory treatment on the basis of sex, the same amendment first proposed by the National Woman’s Party in the 1920s. On March 22, 1972, Congress approved the amendment, stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by any State on account of sex.” 22 states (of the 38 necessary to amend the Constitution) had ratified the ERA.

Answer 20

When the North Vietnamese refused to buckle, Nixon turned up the heat: in April 1970 South Vietnamese and US forces invaded Cambodia in search of arm depots and North Vietnamese army sanctuaries. The president announced publicly that he would not allow “the world’s most powerful nation” to act “like a pitiful, helpless giant.” Instantly, the antiwar movement rose up, as students went out on strike and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in various cities to protest the administration’s policies.

Answer 21

Carter faced problems that would have challenged any leader: the economy continued to decline, energy shortages had not abated, the American people distrust their government. Throughout most of the 1970s, the US economy floundered in a condition that economists dubbed “stagflation”: a stagnant economy characterized by high unemployment combined with out-of-control inflation. Stagflation was almost impossible to manage with traditional economic remedies. Carter couldn't control the inflation.

Answer 22

The centerpiece of Reagan's domestic agenda was the economic program that took his name: Reaganomics. The US economy was in bad shape at the beginning of the 1980s. Stagflation had proved resistant to traditional economic remedies: when the government increased spending to stimulate a stagnant economy, inflation skyrocketed; when it cut spending or tightened the money supply to reduce inflation, the economy plunged deeper into recession, an unemployment rates jumped. Reagan's economic policy was based largely on supply-side economics, the theory that tax-cuts will create economic growth. As people invest less, the economy slows. Even though tax rates remain high, the government collects less in tax revenue because the economy stalls. Cutting taxes, on the other hand, reverses the cycle and increases tax revenues.

Answer 23

The president declared the Reagan Doctrine: the US would openly support anticommunist movements---"freedom fighters"---wherever they were battling Soviet or Soviet-backed governments.

Answer 24

In the Watergate scandal, several men tried to sneak into the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate apartment and office complex. The men were associated with the Committee to Re-elect the President, known as CREEP. While Nixon wasn’t directly involved, when he tried to cover it up by stopping the FBI from investigating further, he was charged with obstructing justice. He also recorded meetings and they were edited.

Answer 25

Locke felt that people, in the state of nature, are reasonable and moral, and they had the natural right to life, liberty, and property. People have the right to break their contract if their government fails them.

Answer 26

Articles of Confederation was the first attempt at a national constitution. It failed and was replaced years later with the Constitution. The Articles of Confederation had many weak points.

Answer 27

In May 1787, 55 men, representing all the states but Rhode Island, assembled in Philadelphia. Most wanted to give the national government new authority over taxation and foreign commerce. James Madison proposed the Virginia Plan, which called for a bicameral, or two-house, legislature, with membership based on each state’s population. Small states supported William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan, which proposed a single-house congress in which each state had an equal vote. Eventually, Roger Sherman suggested the Great Compromise, which offered a two-house Congress to satisfy both small and big states.

Answer 28

On the evening of May 4, 1886, 3,000 people gathered at Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police brutality. Rain began to fall at about 10 o’clock, and the crowd was dispersing when police arrived. Then someone tossed a bomb into the police line. Police fired on the workers; seven police officers and several workers died in the chaos that followed. After Haymarket, the public began to turn against the labor movement.

Answer 29

The most influential advocate of efficient production was Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor concluded that the best way a company could reduce fixed costs and increase profits was to apply systematic studies of “how quickly the various kinds of work…ought to be done”. His experiments, he explained, required studying workers and devising “a series of motions which can be made quickest and best”. As a result of his writings and experiments, time, as much as quality, became the measure of acceptable work, and management accumulated knowledge and power over the ways of doing things.

Answer 30

A person who has become rich through ruthless and unscrupulous business practices. They used things like pools (An epidemic of business consolidation swept the country, resulting in massive conglomerates that have since dominated the nation’s economy. At first, they were tentative and informal, consisting mainly of cooperative agreements among firms that manufactured the same product or offered the same services. Through these arrangements competing companies tried to control the market by agreeing how much each should produce and by sharing profits.Desire for profits often tempted pool members to secretly reduce prices or sell more than the agreed quota. There was no legal way to enforce the gentlemen's agreement.), trusts (John D. Rockefeller disliked pools, calling them weak and undependable. One of his lawyers, Samuel Dodd, devised a more stable means of dominating the market. Because state laws prohibited one corporation from holding stock in another corporation, Dodd suggested utilizing an old device called a trust, a legal arrangement whereby a responsible individual would manage the financial affairs of a person unwilling or unable to handle them alone. He reasoned that one company could control an industry by luring or forcing stockholders of smaller companies in that industry to yield control of their stock “in trust” to the larger company’s board of trustees.), holding companies (In 1888 New Jersey adopted laws allowing corporations chartered there to own property in other states and to own stock in other corporations. This created the holding company, which owned a partial or complete interest in other companies. Holding companies could in turn merge all their holdings’ assets as well as their management.), and vertical and horizontal integration (The trust allowed Rockfeller to achieve horizontal integration–the acquisition of similar companies. A model of such vertical integration, which fused related businesses under unified management.)

Answer 31

Organizations whose main goal were the rewards—money, influence, and prestige—of getting and keeping power. Machine politicians routinely used fraud and bribery to further their ends. But they also provided relief, security, and services to the crowds of newcomers who voted for them and kept them in power.

Answer 32

Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who bought the New York World in 1883, pioneered journalism by making news a mass commodity. Believing that newspapers should be “dedicated to the cause of the people,” Pulitzer filled the World with stories of disasters, crimes, and scandals. Screaming headlines, set in large, bold type like that used for advertisements, attracted readers. Pulitzer’s journalists not only reported news but also sought it out and created it.

Answer 33

Cities became the main arenas for industrial growth in the late nineteenth century. As centers of labor, transportation, and communication, cities supplied everything factories needed. Urban growth and industrialization wound together in a mutually advantageous spiral. The further industrialization advanced, the more opportunities it created for jobs and investment. Increased opportunities drew more people to cities; as workers and consumers, they fueled more industrialization. Although filled with inhabitants rich in varied cultures, the central sections of American cities also seemed to harbor every affliction that plagues modern society: poverty, disease, crime, and the tensions that occur when large numbers of people live close together.

Answer 34

In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that the separation of races in public accommodations was legal and did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which allowed states to maintain segregated facilities for blacks and whites as long as they provided equal service. Southern states passed racial segregation laws to separate white and black people in public and private facilities. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws.

Answer 35

Aimed to return the control of the government to the people, restore economic opportunities, and correct injustices in American Life.

Answer 36

“The Jungle” was a muckraking work by Upton Sinclair, a novel that disclosed outrages of the meatpacking industry. Sinclair was a socialist whose objective was to improve working conditions. President Roosevelt ended up ordering an investigation, and upon finding Sinclair’s descriptions accurate, he passed the Meat Inspection Act. It reinforced the principle of government regulation, requiring that government agents monitor the quality of processed meat.

Answer 37

To justify America’s interference in Latin America, President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The corollary essentially said that the U.S. would use force to protect its economic interests in Latin America. Roosevelt based his Latin America policy on a West African proverb that said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Answer 38

Adopt the Secret Ballot or Australian ballot. Progressives advocated nonpartisan elections to prevent fraud and bribery bred by party loyalties. They also promoted direct primaries, in which all voters could participate, instead of party caucuses, in which only insiders had influence. To make officeholders more responsible, they urged adoption of the initiative, which permitted voters to propose new laws; the referendum, which enabled voters to accept or reject a law; and the recall, which allowed voters to remove offending officials and judges from office.

Answer 39

The motives of these expansionists were complex and varied, but all of them emphasized the supposed benefits of such an approach to the country’s domestic health. Proponents of overseas expansion stressed the benefits that would occur at home should come as no surprise, for foreign policy has always sprung from the domestic setting of a nation. Leaders espoused the idea that the US was an exceptional nation, so different and superior.

Answer 40

Secretary of State John Hay knew that the US couldn’t force the imperial powers out of China, but he was determined to protect American commerce and missionaries. The Open Door policy became a cornerstone of US diplomacy. The “open door” had actually been a longstanding American principle, for as a trading nation the US opposed barriers to international commerce and demanded equal access to foreign markets. The policy became an instrument first to pry open markets and then to dominate them. It also developed as an ideology with several tenets: first, that America’s domestic well-being required exports; second, that foreign trade would suffer interruption unless the US intervened abroad to implant American principles and keep markets open; and third, that the closing of any area to American products, citizens, or ideas threatened the survival of the US itself.

Answer 41

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region.

Answer 42

The president commanded the policymaking process and on occasion tamed the more hawkish proposals of Dulles and VP Richard Nixon. Though polished and articulate, Dulles impressed people as arrogant, stubborn, hectoring, and averse to compromise, an essential characteristic in successful diplomacy. Behind closed doors Dulles could show a different side, one considerably more flexible and pragmatic. His assertion that neutrality was an “immoral and shortsighted conception” did not sit well with Third World leaders, who resented being told they had to choose between East and West.

Answer 43

Little Rock citizens had elected two men to the school board who publicly backed desegregation—and the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, began planning for desegregation soon after Brown. However, Governor Orval Faubus publicly showed support for segregation. In September 1957, he ordered the National Guard to turn away the “Little Rock Nine”—nine African-American students who had volunteered to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School as the first step in Blossom’s plan. A federal judge ordered Faubus to let the students into school. NAACP members called eight of the students and arranged to drive them to school. They could not reach the ninth student, Elizabeth Eckford, who did not have a phone, band she set out alone. Outside Central High, Eckford faced an abusive crowd. Terrified, the 15-year-old made it to a bus stop where two friendly whites stayed with her. The crisis in Little Rock forced Eisenhower to act. He placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and ordered a thousand paratroopers into Little Rock. Eisenhower had to go against his personal beliefs.

Answer 44

Roosevelt began his second term with great optimism and a strong mandate for reform. Almost immediately, however, the president’s own actions undermined his New Deal agenda. Following his landslide electoral victory in 1936, Roosevelt set out to safeguard his progressive agenda. The greatest danger he saw was from the US Supreme Court. Only three of the nine justices were consistently sympathetic to New Deal “emergency” measures, and Roosevelt was convinced the Court would invalidate most of the Second New Deal legislation. Citing the advanced age and heavy workload of the nine justices, he asked Congress for authority to appoint up to six new justices to the Supreme Court. But, many Americans saw Roosevelt’s plan as an attack on constitutional government. Moreover, a new judicial pension program encouraged older judges to retire, and the president appointed seven new associate justices in the next four years. In the end, Roosevelt got what he wanted from the Supreme Court, but the court-packing plan damaged his political credibility.

Answer 45

Organized opposition to feminism came primarily from conservative, often religiously motivated men and women. Also, fears about changing gender roles and expectations fueled the STOP-ERA movement led by Phyllis Schlafly, a lawyer and prominent conservative political activist. Schlafly argued that ERA supporters were “a bunch of bitter women seeking a constitutional cure for their personal problems.” Schlafly and her supporters argued that the ERA would foster federal intervention in personal life, decriminalize rape, force Americans to use unisex toilets, and make women subject to the military draft.

Answer 46

An alliance of national craft unions, the AFL had about 14000 members, most of them skilled workers.Led by Samuel Gompers, former head of the Cigar Makers’ Union, the AFL avoided the Knights’ and anarchists’ idealism to press for concrete goals: higher wages, shorter hours, and the right to bargain collectively.

Answer 47

From 1965 through 1970, labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta led migrant workers, the majority of whom had Mexican ancestry, in a strike against large grape growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Chavez and the AFl-CIO-affiliated United Farm Workers (UFW) drew national attention to the working conditions of migrant workers.

Answer 48

On March 15, Congress finally passed Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act eliminated the so-called literacy tests that had disqualified many voters. It also stated that federal examiners could enroll voters who had been denied suffrage by local officials.

Answer 49

Americans felt more vulnerable to air attack and inferior in rocket technology. To foster future technological advancement, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958.

History Final Flashcards

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