In the period the Truman administration set the foundations for the Cold War. In

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Mercy Fowler
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1 Series Topic: The United States Series Title: The United States after 1945 Series outline: Week 1: War, Prosperity and the Cold War In the period the Truman administration set the foundations for the Cold War. In the 1950s the United States launched a worldwide anticommunist crusade, occasionally with painful long-term consequences. In 1954 McCarthyism closed a dark chapter in American history. - The legacy of F. D. Roosevelt - Going into European politics - The Korean War and the global crusade - The civil rights struggle in the South In the 1930s the United States was economically prostrate, diplomatically isolated and militarily weak. Then came World War II, during which the United States emerged as the leading power of our times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first modern American president, dominated American politics during these momentous years. His successor Harry Truman seemed inadequate at first, but he proved his worth as one of America's greatest modern leaders, laying the foundations of America's postwar engagement in world politics. In spite of the heightening of Cold War tensions, for American society the 1950s were a time of growing affluence and stability. Political passions fell and consensus politics

2 prevailed during the period when the Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled in cooperation with Congress. Like Cuba, Vietnam was a problem that Eisenhower bequeathed to Kennedy. These foreign policy matters, as well as civil rights, were forces building up towards an eruption beneath the tranquil surface of American politics in the Eisenhower years. Recommended reading: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford: Clarendon, George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, expanded edn., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, David McCullough, Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York: Oxford University Press, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, James A. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Week 2: Alliance for Progress The era of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson represented first the triumph and then the crisis of American postwar liberalism. In 1968, the war in Vietnam, riots in the

3 black ghettos, feminism and the counterculture, and the conservative backlash, ended the New Deal. - Free at last - Risking a world war over Cuba - Commitment to Vietnam - Great Society In his inaugural address, the 44-year-old John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president in American history, declared that "the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans." Although his election and stirring rhetoric had boosted the Civil Rights movement, Kennedy had to be pushed to action by it. Martin Luther King's speech, in August 1963, was the greatest restatement of his generation of the liberal values. Kennedy underestimated the complexity of the modernization challenges in the Third World. His initial optimism about progressive reforms in Latin America was overshadowed by the CIA's "dirty wars." The Cuban Crisis, probably the most dangerous in the Cold War, showed that both sides were prepared to fall back to more conciliatory positions. Lyndon Baines Johnson passed in the first two years of his presidency a series of liberal reforms that rivalled those of Roosevelt. His hopes of becoming the greatest liberal reformer in American history seemed not unreasonable. Johnson's Great Society reforms, passed in 1965, are amongst the most impressive legislative facts in American history and have had a lasting effect on the American welfare state. But Johnson was "trapped" in

4 South Vietnam and he dared not withdraw. On March 3, 1968, he announced a unilateral end of American bombing and his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race. Vietnam powerfully contributed to the domestic upheavals that shook America in the second half of the 1960s. Recommended reading: Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant Lyndon Johnson and his Times, , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Jim E. Heath, Decade of Disillusionment: The Kennedy-Johnson Years, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, James A. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938, New York: Viking, Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, New York: Touchstone, Week 3: Two heavily armed blind men Richard Nixon reshaped American foreign policy after the debacle of Vietnam. After his resignation over Watergate, American politics moved leftwards, but the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and their failures had contributed to a strong political swing to the right.

5 - The détente - China move - The Camp David agreement - Beating on an empty drum Violence and unrest in the ghettos and growing antiwar protests during contributed to a widespread sense of crisis in American society. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. On June 5, 1968, just after his victory in the California primary, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated. When Richard Nixon became president, the edifice of postwar American foreign policy was badly shaken. The global anticommunist crusade, which a bipartisan consensus had supported, resulted in the Vietnam quagmire, draining American resources and undermining the consensus at home. Nixon and Kissinger were able to transcend the Manichean view of the Soviet Union and opened the United States to China, but the Watergate scandal deepened the crisis of confidence in America's public institutions that had begun with Vietnam. Gerald Ford was handicapped by the fact that he had pardoned Nixon in September James Carter was a moderate and central to his foreign policy was the worldwide support for human rights, by which he hoped that the United States would regain the Wilsonian moral high ground that it had lost with the Vietnam War. Carter took office announcing it was time to move beyond the view "that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable" and beyond "that ordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who

6 joined us in that fear." In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Carter imposed economic sanctions and called for a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games. Recommended reading: Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, New York: HarperCollins, Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, London: Allen Lane, Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, New York: Scribner, Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, New York: Simon & Schuster, Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, New York: Free Press, Week 4: Conservative Revolution The Reagan Revolution moved American politics out of the malaise of the 1970s. Reagan revived American nationalism traumatized by its failure in Vietnam. The 1980s witnessed both the decline of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-cold War problems. The years brought both the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War. - "We are going to keep it" - Government is the problem

7 - "Voodoo economics" - The end of the Cold War Developments in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a new cultural cleavage in American society. Feminism, sexual liberation and gay rights challenged traditional morality. The Supreme Court protected pornography and forbade prayer in public schools. In 1973, in its landmark Roe versus Wade decision, it maintained a woman's right to abortion. Three major currents in American society converged in 1980 and produced Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution. The first was a revival of American nationalism. The second aspect was related to the economy. A new economic culture of living on credit emerged. The third aspect was the political activation of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants on the Republican side. From the outset, Reagan moved against détente and a central instrument was his massive defense build-up. Particularly effective, though with unintended long-term side effects, was Reagan's support for the mujahideen (holy warriors) that were fighting against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The Cold War began to wind down with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership in Superpower relations continued to improve during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. At the beginning of August 1990 the focus of the Bush administration shifted to the Persian Gulf and the coalition liberated Kuwait in early Yet in the elections of November 1992 Bush lost to Clinton.

8 Recommended reading: Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, New York: Free Press, Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbot, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, New York: Little, Brown, Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Week 5: American hegemony In the 1990s the American public basked in the misleading sense of security of the "unipolar moment" and enjoyed the fruits of the two longest economic booms in American history. But the world was increasingly divided into zones of peace, democracy and economic interdependence, and of conflict, failed states and humanitarian disasters. - Promoting liberal world order - Retreat from Somalia - Enlarging NATO - Scandals and Surpluses Bill Clinton largely embraced the legacy of the Reagan Revolution and in 1996 he declared that "the era of Big Government is over." Clinton demonstrated fiscal frugality by downsizing the federal bureaucracy and getting rid of excess personnel.

9 In early 1998 the Lewinsky scandal broke out, but Clinton survived the Republican attacks and their impeachment project. The United States in the 1990s had an unusually dominant role in managing global affairs. With the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy found itself without a clear mission analogous to the containment. Two bids by academics to define the new challenges of American foreign policy were Francis Fukuyama's argument about the end of history and Samuel Huntington's argument about the clash of civilizations. Clinton's humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo demonstrated that the United States was able to bomb any particular point on the planet with an accuracy measured in meters. Recommended reading: Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, New York: Random House, Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press, Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, Rob Kroes, If You've Seen One You've Seen the Mall, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, Paul Krugman, The Great Unravelling, New York: Norton, 2004.

10 William Marling, How 'American' Is Globalization? Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, Richard Pells, Not Like Us, New York: Basic, Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, New York: Simon & Schuster, Week 6: "America is a tale still being told" George W. Bush rose to the presidency with the most controversial presidential election in American history. The 9/11 attacks displaced all else at the top of the American politics. Bush squandered international goodwill towards the United States by invading Iraq, opening the way for Obama's historic victory in A new era of insecurity - Preemptive strikes - "Obamania" - Neither the End of History nor the American Dream The 2000 election results were among the most even in American history. The US Supreme Court determined the election in George W. Bush's favor. The 9/11 attacks were a shock because a nonstate actor succeeded in striking at the center of the most powerful nation in the world. The origins of this new terrorist threat are to be found in the Islamic resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

11 After Afghanistan, an "Islamist international" organized by Al Qaeda became involved in a vast and heterogeneous field of operations. One consequence of 9/11 was that the pendulum between security and civil liberties swung violently towards the security end. In 2002 the Bush administration adopted the controversial doctrine of preemptive strikes, its first application was Iraq in The election of an African American to the presidency suggested that the American people were ready for change on politics and government. Barack Obama inherited ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, which broke out at the end of Bush's presidency. Even though Obama performed creditably well on most of fronts, the high expectations that greeted his accession to the presidency had been somewhat lowered. Recommended reading: Robert Draper. Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, New York: Free Press, James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, New York: Viking Books, Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, New York: Vintage Books, The 9/11 Commission Report Final Report of the Nations Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, New York: Norton, 2004.

Know how Mao Zedong and the Communists win the Communist Civil War and took over China from Chang Kai Shek?

Know how Mao Zedong and the Communists win the Communist Civil War and took over China from Chang Kai Shek? U.S HISTORY SECOND SEMESTER REVIEW KNOW THESE MATCHING TERMS: 1. The Berlin airlift 2. Tet Offensive 3. Domino Theory 4. Ho Chi Mihn 5. Freedom Riders 6. Malcolm X 7. Brown v. Board of Education 8. Jackie