Chapter 23 History

Which of the two Chinese governments did the United States recognize as the "real" China from 1949 to the 1970s?

Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government on Taiwan

What country became a Communist foothold in the Western Hemisphere by the early 1960s?

Cuba

What was the last Eastern European nation to fall to Soviet domination after World War II?

Czechoslovakia

Under which president was the interstate highway system begun?

Dwight Eisenhower

What are the two major agencies of the United States?

General Assembly and Security Council

Name three nations that were split into Communist and non-Communist divisions after World War II.

Germany, Korea, and Vietnam

Name the four major candidates and their parties in the 1948 presidential election.

Harry Truman - Democrat; Thomas Dewey - Republican; Strom Thurmond - Dixiecrat; Henry Wallace - Progressive

Causality

Historians are interested in why things happened; the cause of things. Sometimes these causes can be very complex and difficult to nail down. If history is more than just the facts, but rather competing perceptions of the past you are going to have different historians who uncover different evidence or have a different point of view and they will offer different causes for how things happened. History is always looking for the ways acts or events are caused by social or political or intellectual or religious or economic forces.

Context

Historians can't just pull quotes from documents and use those quotes to represent beliefs or that time period. They must understand these ideas that these quotes represent in context with other ideas and with the other thoughts of a particular writer. As a Historian, you want to look at the different things that the writer has said in context with the other things they have said. Historians study context by looking at events in the larger world in which those events have happened. Examples would be looking at the political developments and the intellectual developments.

Who emerged as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott?

Martin Luther King Jr

How does the career of Jospeh McCarthy illustrate the danger of pursuing a worthy cause in an unworthy manner?

McCarthy's exploitative methods alienated some people who might have otherwise joined the anti-Communist crusade, and his repudiation by the Senate gave the impression to some that the anti-Communist movement was a political ploy rather than a genuinely important movement

What lessons can one learn from the history of the Berlin Wall?

One lesson is that people want to flee tyranny, even risking their lives to do so when an alternative of greater freedom is available to them. Another lesson is that tyrants, knowing that people will try to escape to freedom, make every effort to prevent such flight by building walls, erecting fences, and intimidating people

What action sparked the Montgomery bus boycott?

Rosa Parks's to give up her seat on the bus to a white man

During the postwar era, what replaced the downtown area in most cities as the center of retail business activity?

Suburban shopping malls

What replaced movies as the major source of entertainment?

Television

Review the map of the presidential election of 1960 and offer some reasons why the states in certain sections of the nation voted for Kennedy rather than Nixon.

The Northeast voted for Kennedy because it has historically been a center of liberal politices. Much of the South and Southwest supported Kennedy because of the strong Democratic tradition in those areas. The west and much of the heartland states of the Midwest and Upper South voted for Nixon because of thier traditional conservative stantds

Why were the Soviets unable to veto the UN's decision to intervene in Korea?

The Soviets were boycotting the UN meetings to protest that the U.S. refused to recognize Communist China

What event caused MacArthur to say that the Korean conflict had become "an entirely new war"?

The intervention of Communist China on behalf of North Korea

Complexity

The past is complex because human beings are complex and this is the study of human beings. The past is complex and we are going to encounter people that are complicated and nuanced individuals.

What did the Communists do to stop the escape of refugees to West Berlin?

They built the Berlin Wall

In addition to calling for stronger conventional forces, what did Truman do in reaction to the Soviet development of the atomic bomb?

Truman called for the development of the hydrogen bomb

Technically, what is a "civil right"?

A civil right is "a basic right that is granted because of one's citizenship and that the government is responsible for actively protecting from both government and individual interference."

Contingency

All events are contingent upon other events. In other words, human history is the story of humans acting in time and the decisions and the choices that humans in the past make are going to have effects on the choices and decisions that other human beings in the past make. They are contingent upon one another. Historians are interested in studying human beings and the decisions and the choices that they make and how those choices affect movements, events, and other choices that are going to come down the road.

Change over time

Historical thinking is a progressive type of thinking. Change over time is moving over time from point a to point b. Point b being more and more closer to the present.

Reason to study history 2

History contributes to moral understanding

Reason to study history 6

History helps us participate in our community in meaningful ways

Reason to study history 3

History helps us understand change

Reason to study history 4

History helps us understand people and societies

Reason to study history 5

History provides identity

Reason to study history 1

History well told is beautiful

How should a Christain view the rise of consumerism?

I can see both sides of the argument here. On one hand, a consumer culture can be good. It creates a competition for companies, which in turn can result in better/improved products that are more useful. On the other hand, the production of all these new products can cause many new temptations to arise. A consumer culture, as a result, isn't good. It can cause an idolization of materialistic goods which has the potential to result in debt. This idolization isn't good because it creates a selfish society, one that makes us more focused on ourselves than others. This pulls us away from what we are suppoed to do which is share the gospel and love others. It also creates an unhealthy addiction, but the thing to remember is that these are material goods and won't provide us much satisfaction in the long run. Which is why we keep wanting more and more. God is the real satisfaction. We don't find our identity in our materials, even though we think we do, we find out identity in God.

Was the Korean War a success or a failure for the United States? Why?

It was a success because the United States achieved its goal of saving South Korea from communism. It was also a failure because it did not unite Korea under non-Communist rule and ended in a negotiated settlement instead of total victory

During the postwar era, some Christians were reluctant to support the civil rights movement, in part, because it was supported by theological and political liberals. Evaluate this stance from Scripture.

Scripture teaches that all people are created in the image of God and that we are to regard others as more important than ourselves and to look out for the interests of others. In addition, justice is a primary responsibility of government, including delivering those who are oppressed by injustice. The Christian standard has to be Scripture rather than political alignments.

Give three examples of how Eisenhower expanded federal programs.

Social Security coverage expanded; Minimum wage was raised; New cabinet department; Aid for education was increased; Promotion of interstate highway system

What new political tool was important in helping Kennedy defeat Nixon in 1960?

Television

What is a "right-to-work" law?

This law banned the union shop, requiring union membership for hiring

Name the two countries whose resistance to communism caused Truman to announce the Truman Doctrine.

Turkey and Greece

What action by the Allies led Stalin to blockade West Berlin?

When the Allies decided to form a unified government for West Germany, Stalin decided to blockade West Berlin