The Cold War Through Truman

  • Cold War
  • Taft-Hartley Act
  • demobilization; G.I. Bill of Rights
  • inflation; cost of living
  • satellite nations
  • George F. Kennan; containment;
    "iron curtain"
  • Truman Doctrine
  • Yalta and Potsdam
  • George C. Marshall; Dean Acheson
  • Marshall Plan
  • occupation zones; Berlin Blockade; Berlin airlift
  • NATO; Warsaw Pact
  • China's "fall"; Jiang Jieshi; Mao Zedong; Taiwan; "Red China"
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  • NSC-68 civil defense; H-bomb
  • "witch hunts"
  • HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee); Alger Hiss; Richard Nixon
  • Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
  • 38th Parallel; "police action"; Pusan; Inchon; MacArthur; "limited war"; "wrong war at the wrong place in the wrong time and with the wrong enemy"; armistice; "carpet bombing"
  • National Security Act 1947 Dixiecrats (States' Rights Democratic Party, J.Strom Thurmond); Progressive Party and Henry Wallace (former Democrat)
  • "Fair Deal"

Questions to guide your reading and studying:
  1. Why did America demobilize so quickly? What was the impact on veterans, families, women?
  2. What was the GI Bill of Rights and its impact on veterans, women and higher education?
  3. What are the main points of contention between Truman and the 80th Congress?
  4. How did the following react to postwar inflation: Truman? labor? GOP response to Truman and labor?
  5. Why did Truman refuse to acquiesce to Stalin's efforts in Eastern Europe?
  6. What was Kennan's policy suggestion?
  7. What was Churchill's metaphor for Soviet expansion?
  8. What are the characteristics of a "cold war"?
  9. How did Greece and Turkey's anti-communist struggles give rise to the Truman Doctrine?
  10. What were the key promises of Truman's "Fair Deal"? What happened to his promises?
  11. In what ways did the Marshall Plan attempt to contain communism?
  12. Describe the cause and effect of the Berlin blockade.
  13. What wassignificant about the U.S. joining NATO? How did NATO and Warsaw Pact increase tensions in Europe?
  14. How did the Truman administration deal with accusations that it was "soft on communism”?
  15. Where did communism take hold in the Pacific? Where did it NOT? Why?
  16. How did the "fall of China" affect American foreign policy?
  17. Why are the Rosenbergs significant in American history?
  18. What was the focus and impact of the HUAC hearings?
  19. What was the source of conflict between Truman and Gen. MacArthur?
  20. What was a limited war?
  21. What were the consequences of the Korean War - sometimes called the "forgotten war"?

The Cold War Through Eisenhower
  • "Modern Republicanism"
  • Interstate Highway System
  • Army-McCarthy hearings
  • Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. (1954); "in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place"; "with all deliberate speed"
  • Southern manifesto
  • Orval Faubus; Little Rock 9
  • John Foster Dulles; massive retaliation
  • "brinkmanship", rollback
  • covert action
  • Nikita Khrushchev
  • Sputnik; space race
  • Shah Reza Pahlavi
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  • Indochina; Vietminh; Ho Chi Minh;
    DienBienPhu
  • "domino theory"
  • Ngo Dinh Diem
  • Suez Crisis; Nasser
  • Eisenhower Doctrine
  • U-2 spy plane
  • "military industrial complex"
  • McCarthyism; Joseph R. McCarthy;
  • 1952 presidential election: Democrat Adlai Stevenson vs. Republican Dwight David Eisenhower; Richard Nixon; slush fund; "checkers speech"
  • Rosa Parks; Montgomery
  • Betty Friedan

Questions to guide your reading and studying:
  1. What did Ike mean by "modern Republicanism"?
  2. What were Eisenhower's strengths? Shortcomings?
  3. What was the role of women in society in the 1950s? Did this apply to all women?
  4. What finally brought down Joseph McCarthy? What was McCarthyism's legacy?
  5. How did Brown v. Board change society? In what ways did Southerners react to Brown? The rest of the nation?
  6. What methods were employed by Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement? Were they successful?
  7. Eisenhower was not a civil rights activist. So why did he send troops to Central High in Little Rock in 1957?
  8. In what ways did TV play a role in the early civil rights movement?
  9. What were John Foster Dulles' key ideas? How did his Soviet policy differ from previous administrations?
  10. Because they both feared nuclear confrontation, the U.S. and Soviets fought their wars where and in what ways?
  11. How did the CIA use covert methods to fight communism?
  12. How did the U.S. support the French in Indochina? Why was DienBienPhu important?
  13. What was Ike's "domino theory" and how does it encourage the U.S. to think and behave?
  14. What caused the Suez Crisis? What were its consequences?
  15. What was the impact of Sputnik?
  16. What was the Eisenhower Doctrine, where was it employed and how did it differ from the Truman Doctrine?
  17. What was the ultimate outcome of the U-2 incident?
  18. What is Eisenhower's legacy?