APUSH All Year

Pat Robertson

A television evangelist who organized the Christian Coalition to replace Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority as the flagship organization of the resurgent religious right.

counterculture

"Hippie" youth culture of the 1960s, which rejected the values of the dominant culture in favor of illicit drugs, communes, free sex, and rock music.

participatory democracy

Tom Hayden's term for the former style of American government since lost to oppressive influences of major organizations such governments, corporations, and universities.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC) Civil rights organization founded in 1957 by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders.

Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS) Major organization of the New Left, founded at the University of Michigan in 1960 by Tom Hayden and A1 Haber.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) Founded in 1960 to coordinate civil rights sit-ins and other forms of grassroots protest.

Bush v. Gore

U.S. Supreme Court case that determined the winner of the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Albert Gore, Jr.

Vice President from Tennessee under Bill Clinton who ran for presidency in 2003 and lost to George W. Bush.

Richard Cheney

Vice President under George W. Bush who had served as secretary of defense under the senior George Bush.

Madeleine Albright

Ambassador to the United Nations who became the first woman to head the State Department.

Gideon v. Wainwright

(1963) U.S. Supreme Court decision guaranteeing legal counsel for indigent felony defendants.

Tonkin Gulf Resolution

(1964) Passed by Congress in reaction to supposedly unprovoked attacks on American warships off the coast of North Vietnam; it gave the president unlimited authority to defend U.S. forces and members of SEATO.

Miranda v. Arizona

(1966) U.S. Supreme Court decision required police to advise persons in custody of their rights to legal counsel and against self-incrimination.

Congress of Racial Equality

(CORE) Civil rights organization started in 1944 and best known for its "freedom rides," bus journeys challenging racial segregation in the South in 1961.

Kenneth Starr

A Republican who was appointed to serve as independent counsel in the Whitewater case.

George C. Wallace

A Southern traditionalist governor who remained steadfast in opposing integration, who in 1963 stood dramatically in the doorway of a building at the University of Alabama to block the enrollment of several black students.

Immigration Act of 1964

A bill initiated by President Kennedy and signed by Johnson in 1965, the act treated people of all nationalities and races equally, abolishing discriminatory quotas and allowing unlimited entry of American residents' immediate family members.

Adarand Constructors v. Pena

A case in which the Court assessed a program that gave some advantages to businesses owned by "disadvantaged" minorities.

Hopwood v. Texas

A case in which the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that considering race to achieve a diverse student body at the University of Texas was "not a compelling interest under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Peace Corps

A celebrated governmental program, created in 1961 under the Kennedy administration, which supplies volunteers to provide educational and technical services abroad.

Medicare

A comprehensive governmental medical care program for the elderly, initiated by President Johnson in 1965.

Clarence Thomas

A conservative federal judge who was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill.

Proposition 187

A controversial initiative that denied California's estimated 4 million illegal immigrants access to public schools, nonemergency health care, and other social services.

Operation Enduring Freedom

A ferocious military campaign launched by the United States and its allies to find and punish terrorists or "those harboring terrorists."

freedom riders

A group of black and white progressives who boarded public busses together to test a federal court ruling that banned segregation on buses and trains, resulting in assaults by Alabama mobs and drawing national attention to the cause.

Christian Coalition

A group that encouraged religious conservatives to vote, run for public office, and support only those candidates who shared the organization's views.

Bill Gates

A man who, as a Harvard sophomore, improved the software of the Altair 8800 and eventually helped to transform the personal computer from a hobby machine to a mass consumer product.

Office of Homeland Security

A new federal agency created to address the threat of domestic terrorism and to help restore public confidence after 9/11.

Sit-In

A nonviolent form of protest begun when four black college students sat down and demanded service at a "whites-only" lunch counter in 1960, starting a movement which quickly spread throughout the country.

Hubert H. Humphrey

A prominent liberal senator from Minnesota dedicated to the promotion of civil rights, he served as Johnson's vice-president from 1964-68 and ran an unsuccessful personal campaign for the presidency in 1968.

Black Panther party

A provocative and armed group of urban revolutionaries founded in Oakland, California in 1966 that terrified the public but eventually fragmented in spasms of violence.

Whitewater Development Corporation

A resort project on the White River in northern Arkansas that the Clintons invested in that turned out to be a fraud and a failure.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

A stirring defense of the nonviolent strategy that became a classic of the civil rights movement, written by Martin Luther King from his jail cell after being arrested while demonstrating in 1963.

James H. Meredith

A student denied entrance to the University of Mississippi in 1962 because he was black, Merideth's case caused Attorney General Robert Kennedy to dispatch federal marshals to enforce the law and, after a bloody protest from a white mob, Meredith was finally able to register at "Ole Miss."

Patrick Buchanan

A television commentator and former White House aide who challenged Bush in the Republican primary.

Contract with America

A ten-point contract that outlined an anti-big-government program with less regulation, less conservation, term limits for members of Congress, a line-item veto for the president, welfare reform, and a balanced-budget amendment.

Osama bin Laden

A wealthy Saudi renegade who sought to mobilize Muslim militants, energized by local causes, into a global army aimed at the West.

Barry Goldwater

A wealthy Senator from Arizona who emerged in 1960 as the leader of the Republican right and lost to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election.

Al-Qaeda

A well-financed worldwide network of Islamic extremists.

John F. Kennedy

A young Democrat who defeated Richard Nixon to win the presidency in 1960 who focused his efforts on liberal reform and furthering civil rights until his tragic assassination in 1963.

Family and Medical Leave Act

Allowed certain workers to take twelve weeks of unpaid leave each year for family health problems, including birth or adoption of a child.

William C. Westmoreland

An American Army General who served as commander of the American troops in Vietnam beginning in March 1965.

Weathermen

An indiscriminately violent group that emerged from the breakup of the SDS in 1968.

Proposition 209

An initiative that ruled out race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin as criteria for preferring any group.

Woodstock Music Festival

An outdoor music festival at rural New York farm in 1969, it featured a lineup of popular counterculture performers and was attended by 500,000 people.

Taliban

An ultraconservative Islamic faction that emerged in the mid-1990s following the forced withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

War on Poverty

Announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1964 State of the Union address; under the Economic Opportunity Bill signed later that year, Head Start, VISTA, and the Jobs Corps were created, and grants and loans were extended to students, farmers, and businesses in efforts to eliminate poverty.

Betty Friedan

Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and leading founder of the women's organization NOW in 1966.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Black Reverend, leader of the SCLC, and winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the American civil rights movement, he espoused a philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Cuban missile crisis

Caused when the United States discovered Soviet offensive missile sites in Cuba in October 1962; the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was the cold war's closest brush with nuclear war.

March on Washington

Civil rights demonstration on August 28, 1963, where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream'' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

hippies

Counterculture advocates, largely educated and affluent white youths who felt alienated from American society and its various institutions.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Created under the Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson in 1964, the commission administered a ban on job discrimination by race, religion, national origin, or sex.

postindustrial

Economy at the end of the twentieth century that continued to shift from manufacturing to professional service industries, particularly those specializing in telecommunications and information processing.

ENIAC

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, built in 1944, the early, cumbersome ancestor of the modern computer.

Alan Greenspan

Federal Reserve Board chairman whose firm and astute leadership helped American business and industry witness record profits as the twentieth century came to a close.

Bob Dole

Former Republican Senate majority leader who ran against Bill Clinton.

Free Speech movement (FSM)

Founded in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley by student radicals protesting restrictions on their right to demonstrate.

Bay of Pigs

Hoping to inspire a revolt against Fidel Castro, the CIA sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland on April 17, 1961, but the mission was a spectacular failure.

Ralph Nader

Independent candidate and liberal activist who ran in the 2003 election.

Lee Harvey Oswald

John F. Kennedy's assassin, who shot the President on his visit to Dallas Texas in November of 1963.

New Frontier

John F. Kennedy's program, stymied by a Republican Congress and his abbreviated term; his successor Lyndon B. Johnson had greater success with many of the same concepts.

Robert C. Weaver

The first black cabinet member, he headed the new Department of Housing and Urban Development formed under the Johnson administration in 1966.

Patriot Act

New legislation that gave government agencies the right to eavesdrop on confidential conversations between prison inmates and their lawyers.

Yippies

Nickname for members of the Youth International party, an outlandish protest group which supported nihilism, anarchy, and psychedelic drugs.

silent majority

Nickname for the American majority that was wooed by Nixon and the Republicans' promise of a vision of stability and order in the U.S. in the presidential race of 1968.

Eugene "Bull" Connor

Police Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, who responded to Martin Luther King's 1963 nonviolent demonstrations with attack dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and fire hoses, while millions of outraged Americans watched the confrontations on television.

H. Ross Perot

Off-and-on independent presidential candidate and billionaire who found a big audience for his simplified explanations of public problems and his offers to just "get under the hood and fix them."

Malcolm X

One of America's most effective voices for urban black militancy, the self-proclaimed extremist organized black power alliances and published his Autobiography before his murder by a rival faction of Black Muslims in 1965.

Altamont

One of several failed attempts to repeat the earlier success of Woodstock; the Altamont concert, four months later in California, was a violent disaster and the scene of several deaths.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Passed in the wake of Martin Luther King's Selma to Montgomery March, it authorized federal protection of the right to vote and permitted federal enforcement of minority voting rights in individual counties, mostly in the South.

George W. Bush

The first president since John Quincy Adams to follow his father in the White House.

Black Power

Post-1966 rallying cry of a more militant civil rights movement.

Medicaid

President Johnson's program, signed in 1965, allocating federal grants to states that would help cover medical payments for the indigent.

Bill Clinton

President who faced allegations of both sexual and financial scandal that grew into a relentless inquiry such as no previous president had ever before encountered.

New Left

Radical youth protest movement of the 1960s, named by leader Tom Hayden to distinguish it from the Old (Marxist-Leninist) Left of the 1930s.

Branch Davidians

Religious cult that lived communally near Waco, Texas, and was involved in a fiery 1993 confrontation with federal authorities in which dozens of cult members died.

The Conscience of a Conservative

Republican Senator Barry Goldwater's 1960 book, in which he advocated an abolition of the income tax, sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and a drastic overhaul of Social Security.

Newton Leroy Gingrich

Republican Speaker of the House who launched a series of attacks on the ethics of the Democratic leadership in the House, and who helped mobilize religious and social conservatives associated with the Christian Coalition.

de jure segregation

Segregation amenable to changes in law.

de facto segregation

Segregation due to circumstance, such residential patterns, rather than discrimination under the law.

Robert F. Kennedy

Senator and brother of John F. Kennedy, an outspoken leader of the antiwar forces and presidential candidate who was assassinated during his campaign in June of 1968.

The Other America

Social critic and author Michael Harrington's powerful expose, published in 1962, which helped inspire President Kennedy to investigate America's poverty problem.

Ngo Dinh Diem

Southern Vietnam's Catholic Premier, whose use of repressive tactics against Communists and the Buddhist majority, along with his failure to deliver promised social and economic reforms lost him popular support in the early 1960s.

Montgomery bus boycott

Sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest on December 1, 1955, a successful year-long boycott protesting segregation on city buses; led by the Reverend Martin Luther King.

Sunbelt

States of the South and West which during the last quarter of the twentieth century continued to lure residents from the Midwest and Northeast.

Tet Offensive

Surprise attack by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the Vietnamese New Year of 1968; turned American public opinion strongly against the war in Vietnam.

Great Society

Term coined by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1965 State of the Union address, in which he proposed legislation to address problems of voting rights, poverty, diseases, education, immigration, and the environment.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Texan Democrat who served as John F. Kennedy's vice-president and assumed the presidency after Kennedy's assassination in 1963, devoted to furthering civil rights and promising Americans a "Great Society."

Rolling Thunder

The first sustained bombings of North Vietnam, an operation ordered by President Johnson which was intended to stop the flow of soldiers and supplies into the south.

NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico allowed goods to travel across their borders free of tariffs; critics argued that American workers would lose their jobs to cheaper Mexican labor.

Warren Court

The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1953-69, decided such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of Education (school desegregation), Baker v. Carr (legislative redistricting), and Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona (rights of criminal defendants).

high crimes and misdemeanors

The constitutional requirement for removal of a president.

ethnic cleansing

The driving of people from their homes and towns, burning villages, murdering males, raping females, and displacing hundreds of thousands people.

Selma to Montgomery march

The fifty-mile route followed by a group of civil rights protesters in 1965, over 35,000 of whom reached Montgomery, where Martin Luther King delivered a rousing address from the steps of the state capitol.

Civil Rights Act of 1965

The most far-reaching civil rights measure ever enacted by the Congress, it outlawed discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

Welfare reform measure that mandated state administration of federal aid to the poor.

Downsizing

When companies reduce personnel, switch employees to part-time status to reduce benefits, and find other ways to cut labor costs.

Waco, Texas

Where a confrontation between federal authorities and a militia group resulted in catastrophic consequences.

Stokely Carmichael

Young leader of the SNCC, who made the separatist philosophy of black power the groups official objective and ousted whites from the organization in 1966.