Cold War, civil rights, and the Great Society.

Containment (Truman Doctrine 1947, Marshall Plan 1948, NATO 1949) became U.S. grand strategy after the Soviet Union held Eastern Europe. The Korean War (1950–1953) tested it militarily; the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) brought the world closest to nuclear war. Vietnam (escalation 1964–1968, withdrawal by 1973, Saigon falls 1975) became containment’s catastrophic failure — 58,000 U.S. dead, ~3 million Vietnamese, the destruction of the Cold War consensus at home. Détente (Nixon to China 1972, SALT) softened tensions briefly before Reagan’s renewed confrontation in the 1980s. McCarthyism, the loyalty oaths, and HUAC policed the domestic Cold War.

*Brown v. Board of Education* (1954) struck down “separate but equal.” Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) launched Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership. Little Rock (1957), the Greensboro sit-ins (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961), Birmingham (1963), the March on Washington (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), Selma (1965), the Voting Rights Act (1965). After 1965 the movement fractured between integrationist and Black Power approaches (Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers). Parallel movements organized through the 1960s and ’70s: Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; AIM and Native sovereignty; the modern feminist movement (NOW 1966, Roe 1973, ERA failure); Stonewall (1969) and gay liberation. Each movement borrowed tactics and language from civil rights.

The GI Bill (1944) sent millions to college and into mortgages. Levittown (1947) launched mass suburbanization, segregated by FHA redlining. The Interstate Highway Act (1956) reshaped U.S. geography. Television (50% of U.S. households by 1953, 90% by 1962) created the first national mass culture. Eisenhower-era prosperity coexisted with Beat counterculture and early civil-rights ferment. JFK’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society (Medicare and Medicaid 1965, ESEA 1965, immigration reform 1965) expanded the federal social state. Vietnam, urban riots (Watts 1965, Detroit 1967), assassinations (1968), and Watergate (1972–1974) shattered the postwar liberal consensus by the late 1970s. Stagflation, the oil crisis (1973), and the Iran hostage crisis (1979–81) set the stage for Reagan.

U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew from ~900 advisors (1960) to 540,000 troops (1968). The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Aug 1964) gave LBJ open-ended war powers without a declaration; the Tet Offensive (Jan 1968), though a tactical Communist defeat, shattered U.S. confidence in official optimism. The war killed 58,000 U.S. soldiers and ~3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The antiwar movement — campus teach-ins (1965), the March on the Pentagon (1967), Kent State (May 1970, four students killed by Ohio National Guard), the Pentagon Papers (1971) — fragmented the New Deal coalition. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” (1969) and the Paris Peace Accords (Jan 1973) ended U.S. combat involvement; Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975. The War Powers Resolution (1973) tried to constrain future presidential war-making.

The countercultural “hippie” movement (1965–73) rejected mainstream consumer norms — Woodstock (1969) is the canonical moment but the New Left and SDS gave it political bones. The modern feminist movement: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the founding of NOW (1966), Ms. Magazine (1971), Roe v. Wade (1973), Title IX (1972, gender equity in education and athletics). The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1972 but failed ratification by 1982 — Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign was the period’s most successful conservative counter-mobilization. Gay liberation: the Stonewall Inn riots (June 1969) launched the modern movement; the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its disorder list in 1973. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized the United Farm Workers (1962); the American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz (1969–71) and Wounded Knee (1973).

The GI Bill (1944) sent ~8 million veterans to college and underwrote ~2.4 million home mortgages by 1956. The Federal Housing Administration (1934–) and Veterans Administration insured cheap 30-year mortgages — but redlining maps drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation marked Black neighborhoods “hazardous” and excluded them from the loans. Levittown (1947) and similar mass-produced suburbs explicitly excluded Black families through restrictive covenants until Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) made them legally unenforceable. The Interstate Highway Act (1956) — pitched as national defense — accelerated suburban sprawl and destroyed Black neighborhoods through urban renewal (Detroit’s Black Bottom, Manhattan’s Lincoln Square). The result: the postwar boom’s gains accumulated disproportionately in white suburban households, creating the racial wealth gap that defines the U.S. today.