Ch 29

Front 1

Levittown

Back 1

Levittown is the name of four large suburban developments created in the United States of America by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. They featured large numbers of similar houses that were built easily and quickly, allowing rapid recovery of costs.

Front 2

Baby Boom

Back 2

The term "baby boom" most often refers to the dramatic post-World War II baby boom (1946-1964). There are an estimated 78.3 million Americans who were born during this demographic boom in births. The term is a general demographic one and is also applicable to other similar population expansions.

Front 3

Sputnik

Back 3

The first of these, Sputnik 1, launched the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. That launch took place on October 4, 1957 as part of the International Geophysical Year and demonstrated the viability of using artificial satellites to explore the upper atmosphere.

Front 4

Highway Act of 56

Back 4

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (Public Law 84-627), was enacted on June 29, 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law. With an original authorization of 25 billion dollars for the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of the Interstate Highway System supposedly over a 20-year period, it was the largest public works project in American history through that time.
The money for the Interstate Highway and Defense Highways was handled in a highway trust fund that paid for 90 percent of highway construction costs with the states required to pay the remaining 10 percent. It was expected that the money would be generated through new taxes on fuel, automobiles, trucks, and tires. As a matter of practice, the Federal portion of the cost of the Interstate Highway System has been paid for by taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel.

Front 5

Commission on Civil Rights

Back 5

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is historically a bipartisan, independent commission of the U.S. federal government charged with the responsibility for investigating, reporting on, and making recommendations concerning civil rights issues that face the nation.

Front 6

Explorer

Back 6

The Explorer program was the United States's first successful attempt to launch an artificial satellite. It began as a U.S. Army proposal to place a scientific satellite into orbit during the International Geophysical Year, however, that proposal was rejected in favor of the U.S. Navy's Project Vanguard. The Explorer program was later reestablished to catch up with the Soviet Union after that nation's launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. (See: Sputnik crisis) Explorer 1 was launched January 31, 1958. Besides being the first U.S. satellite, it is known for discovering the Van Allen radiation belt.

Front 7

Brown v. BOE

Back 7

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

Front 8

Plessy v Ferguson

Back 8

lessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal".
The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer was absent at the ruling because of his daughter's sudden death the day before. "Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Front 9

MLK JR

Back 9

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African American civil rights movement.[1] He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.[2] King is often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism.[3]

Front 10

SCLC

Back 10

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an American civil rights organization. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The SCLC had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement.[1]

Front 11

FEPC

Back 11

The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) implemented US Executive Order 8802, requiring that companies with government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. It was intended to help African Americans and other minorities obtain jobs in the homefront industry. On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) by signing Executive Order 8802, which stated, "there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." This was due in large part to the urging of A. Philip Randolph, who had the support of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Front 12

Presidential Election 1956

Back 12

The United States presidential election of 1956 saw a popular Dwight D. Eisenhower successfully run for re-election. The 1956 election was a rematch of 1952, as Eisenhower's opponent in 1956 was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier.

Front 13

Little Rock Nine

Back 13

The Little Rock Nine were a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. On their first day of school, troops from the Arkansas National Guard would not let them enter the school and they were followed by mobs making threats to lynch.[1]

Front 14

Orville Faubus

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Orval Eugene Faubus (January 7, 1910 – December 14, 1994) was the 36th Governor of Arkansas, serving from 1955 to 1967. He is best known for his 1957 stand against the desegregation of Little Rock public schools during the Little Rock Crisis, in which he defied a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court by ordering the Arkansas National Guard to stop African American students from attending Little Rock Central High School. Despite his initial staunch segregationist stances, Faubus moderated his positions later on. He even endorsed the African American minister, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries.[1]

Front 15

C Wright Mills

Back 15

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, West Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public, political engagement over disinterested observation.

Front 16

David Riesman

Back 16

David Riesman (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 22, 1909; died in Binghamton, New York, May 10, 2002), was a sociologist, attorney, and educator.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review, Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from 1935-1936. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School.

Front 17

John Keats

Back 17

John Keats (pronounced /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.[1] During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2]

Front 18

Katherine Gordon

Back 18

Katherine L. Gordon is a Canadian poet with numerous publications to her credit. She lives and writes in the Eramosa River valley near Guelph, Ontario, and also works as an editor, independent publisher and literary critic.

Front 19

Rosa Parks

Back 19

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress later called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Front 20

Earl Warren

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Earl Warren (March 19, 1891 – July 9, 1974) was the 14th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and one of only two people to be elected Governor of California three times. Before holding these positions, Warren served as a district attorney for Alameda County, California and Attorney General of California. He is best known for the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court, which ended school segregation and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending school prayer, and requiring "one-man-one vote" rules of apportionment. He made the Court a power center on a more even base with Congress and the presidency especially through four landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

Front 21

Thurgood Marshall

Back 21

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

Front 22

Jack Kerouac

Back 22

Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac (pronounced /ˈkɛruːæk/, /ˈkɛrɵæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was a Canadian-American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast, and alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[2] Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins, Will Clarke, Haruki Murakami.[citation needed] Unsympathetic critics of his work have labeled it "slapdash", "grossly sentimental",[3] and "immoral".[4] Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the Hippie movement[5], although he remained antagonistic toward it. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur.

Front 23

Beatniks

Back 23

Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time. The name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes who published an early Beat Generation novel, Go (1952), along with a manifesto in The New York Times Magazine: "This Is the Beat Generation"[1] In 1954, Nolan Miller published his third novel, Why I Am So Beat (Putnam), detailing the weekend parties of four students.

Front 24

Fair Deal

Back 24

In September 1945, United States President Harry Truman addressed Congress and presented a 21 point program of domestic legislation outlining a series of proposed actions in the fields of economic development and social welfare.[1] The proposals to Congress became more and more abundant and by 1948 a legislative program that was more comprehensive came to be known as the Fair Deal

Front 25

SNCC

Back 25

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (conventionally pronounced /ˈsnɪk/) was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 a week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland.

Front 26

Taft-Hartley Act

Back 26

The Labor–Management Relations Act (Pub.L. 80-101, 61 Stat. 136, enacted June 23, 1947, informally the Taft–Hartley Act) is a United States federal law that monitors the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. and legislated by overriding U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill"[1] while President Truman argued it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society,"[2] though he would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency.[3] The Taft–Hartley Act amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA; informally the Wagner Act), which Congress passed in 1935. The principal author of the Taft–Hartley Act was J. Mack Swigert[4] of the Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister.

Front 27

John Birch Society

Back 27

The John Birch Society is an American radical right-wing[1][2] political advocacy group that supports anti-communism, limited government, a Constitutional Republic[3][4] and personal freedom.[5]
It was founded in 1958 by Robert W. Welch Jr. (1899–1985), who developed an elaborate infrastructure that enabled him to keep a very tight rein on the chapters.[6] Originally based in Belmont, Massachusetts, the JBS is now headquartered in Grand Chute, Wisconsin,[7] with local chapters in all 50 states. The organization owns American Opinion Publishing, which publishes the journal The New American.[

Front 28

NASA

Back 28

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, pronounced /ˈnæsə/) is an Executive Branch agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's civilian space program and aeronautics and aerospace research. Since February 2006, NASA's self-described mission statement is to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."[4]

Front 29

Segregation

Back 29

Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and also to separation of other racial or ethnic minorities from the majority mainstream society and communities.

Front 30

Montgomery bus boycott

Back 30

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. Many historically significant figures of the civil rights movement were involved in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others, as listed below. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city's black population who were the drivers of the boycott were also the bulk of the system's paying customers. The ensuing struggle lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person, to December 20, 1956 when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional.

Front 31

Adlai Stevenson

Back 31

an American politician, noted for his intellectual demeanor, eloquent oratory, and promotion of liberal causes in the Democratic Party. He served as the 31st Governor of Illinois, and received the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1952 and 1956; both times he was defeated by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination for a third time in the election of 1960, but was defeated by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. After his election, President Kennedy appointed Stevenson as the Ambassador to the United Nations; he served from 1961 to 1965. He died on July 14, 1965 in London, England after suffering a fatal heart attack at age 65.

Front 32

NDEA

Back 32

The National Defense Education Act (NDEA), signed into law on September 2, 1958, provided funding to United States education institutions at all levels.[1] The act authorized funding for four years, increasing funding per year: for example, funding increased on eight program titles from 183 million dollars in 1959 to 222 million in 1960.[2] While motivated by the increase in the number of students attending college and a growing national sense that U.S. scientists were falling behind scientists in the Soviet Union, it was arguably catalyzed by early Soviet success in the Space Race, notably the launch of the first-ever satellite, Sputnik, the year before.

Front 33

Dr. Benjamin Spock

Back 33

an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that "you know more than you think you do."[citation needed]
Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be "spoiled" by picking them up when they cried.

Front 34

Will Herberg

Back 34

Will Herberg (1901–1977) was an American Jewish writer, intellectual and scholar. He was known as a social philosopher and sociologist of religion, as well as a Jewish theologian.

Front 35

Modern Republicanism

Back 35

The term applied to the modern ideals of American Republican establishment as laid out by the Republican caucuses in the mid to late 20th century.