AP US History Exam Quizlet
Economic Opportunity Act
1964 act which created a series of programs, including Head Start to prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten and the Job Corps and Upward Bound to provide young people with training and employment, aimed at alleviating poverty and spurring economic growth in impoverished areas.
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)
A decentralized computer network developed in the late 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defense in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Internet grew out of ARPANET.
Women's liberation
A new brand of feminism in the 1960s that attracted primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements who sought to end to the denigration and exploitation of women.
Energy crisis
A period of fuel shortages in the United States after the Arab states in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo in October 1973.
Moral Majority
A political organization established by evangelist Jerry Falwell in 1979 to mobilize conservative Christian voters on behalf of Ronald Reagan's campaign for president.
Abu Ghraib prison
A prison just outside Baghdad, Iraq, where American guards were photographed during the Iraq War abusing and torturing suspected insurgents.
Supply-side economics (Reaganomics)
Economic theory that tax cuts for individuals and businesses encourage investment and production (supply) and stimulate consumption (demand) because individuals can keep more of their earnings. In reality, it created a massive federal budget deficit.
David Stockman
He was Reagan's budget director that proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare to support the tax cut. In 1982 he interviewed with the Atlantic and admitted supply-side theory was based on faith, and admitted to manipulating numbers for favorable numbers.
George H.W. Bush
He was Reagan's vice president and successor though he was not beloved by outsiders. He had served three decades of public service and won the presidential nomination and the presidency because of his fierce loyalty to Reagan.
Osama bin Laden
He was a wealthy Saudi exile who called for a holy war and led Al Qaeda.
Ronald Reagan
He was a well-known movie actor, previous New Deal Democrat, and an admirer of Roosevelt. He was the head of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and the spokesperson for the General Electric Corporation. He joined the Republican Party in the early 1960s and endorsed Barry Goldwater.
Barry Goldwater
He was an archconservative Republican senator from Arizona. He was endorsed for the presidential election in 1964 by Ronald Reagan.
Henry Kissinger
He was sent to Paris by President Nixon for peace talks and accepted the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam.
George W Bush
He was the 2000 Republican presidential nominee and son of President George H.W. Bush. He presented himself as a Washington outsider and won the election by a small margin.
Barack Obama
He was the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee and former Illinois senator. He was the son of an African immigrant student and young Kansas white woman. He won the election.
Newt Gingrich
He was the Georgia Representative who promoted the Contract with America in 1994 and a former Speaker of the House.
Milton Friedman
He was the Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago that was one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals. He published "Capitalism and Freedom" in 1962.
Richard M Nixon
He was the Republican presidential candidate in 1968 and president from 1969 to 1974. He resigned after the Watergate scandal.
George C Wallace
He was the controversial governor of Alabama that ran as a third party candidate for president in 1968. He was also an outspoken segregationist.
Ngo Dinh Diem
He was the dictatorial head of the South Vietnam that the United States had supported since 1955. He was overthrown and assassinated by South Vietnamese generals.
William F Buckley
He was the founder and editor of the conservative magazine the "National Review" that he used to criticize liberal policy.
William (Bill) Clinton
He was the governor of Arkansas in 1992 and styled himself as a New Democrat that would return Reagan Democrats and middle-class voters back to the party. He promised a tax cut for the middle class, universal health insurance, and a reduction of the Republican budget deficit. He won the election in 1992.
Lyndon B Johnson
He was the president from 1963-1969 and the creator of the Great Society. He was a rough-edged southerner that was a seasoned Texas politician and a longtime Senate leader.
Barry Goldwater
He was the presidential candidate in 1964 running against Lyndon B. Johnson. He was an arch-conservative, anticommunist, and anti-government candidate supported by Ronald Reagan.
Mikhail Gorbachev
He was the relatively young Russian leader who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 who recognized the need for internal economic reform and the end to the war in Afghanistan. He introduced glasnost and perestroika, met with Reagan in 1985, agreed to limit all intermediate-range nuclear missiles based in Europe, and ordered Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
The most influential First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt and was elected to the New York Senate in 2000 and 2006. She lost the presidential nomination in 2008 and became Obama's secretary of state in 2009.
Glasnost
The policy introduced by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s that involved greater openness and freedom of expression and that contributed, unintentionally, to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
Multiculturalism
The promotion of diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual preference. This political and social policy became increasingly popular in the United States during the 1980s post-civil rights era.
Webster v Reproductive Health Services
1989 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the authority of state governments to limit the use of public funds and facilities for abortions.
The Conscience of a Conservative
A 1960 book that set forth an uncompromising conservatism and inspired a Republican grassroots movement in support of its author, Barry Goldwater.
Port Huron Statement
A 1962 manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society from its first national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, expressing students' disillusionment with the nation's consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor, as well as a rejection of Cold War foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam.
Immigration and Nationality Act
A 1965 law that eliminated the discriminatory 1924 nationality quotas, established a slightly higher total limit on immigration, included provisions to ease the entry of immigrants with skills in high demand, and allowed immediate family members of legal residents in the United States to be admitted outside of the total numerical limit.
Medicare
A health plan for the elderly passed in 1965 and funded by a surcharge on Social Security payroll taxes.
Medicaid
A health plan for the poor passed in 1965 and paid for by general tax revenues and administered by the states.
Defense of Marriage Act
A law enacted by Congress in 1998 that allowed states to refuse to recognize gay marriages or civil unions formed in other jurisdictions. The Supreme Court ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional in 2013.
Title IX
A law passed by Congress in 1972 that broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, it made women's athletics a real presence on college campuses.
Operation Rescue
A movement founded by religious activist Randall Terry in 1987 that mounted protests outside abortion clinics and harassed their staffs and clients.
Al Qaeda
A network of radical Islamic terrorists organized by Osama bin Laden, who issued a call for holy war against Americans and their allies. Its members were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Vietnamization
A new U.S. policy, devised under President Nixon in the early 1970s, of delegating the ground fighting to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. American troop levels dropped and American causalities dropped correspondingly, but the killing in Vietnam continued.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
An organization for social change founded by college students in 1960.
Silent Spring
Book published in 1962 by biologist Rachel Carson. Its analysis of the pesticide DDT's toxic impact on the human and natural food chains galvanized environmental activists.
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
Commission appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, which issued a 1963 report documenting job and educational discrimination.
Multinational corporations
Corporations with offices and factories in multiple countries, which expanded to find new markets and cheaper sources of labor. Globalization was made possible by the proliferation of these mulinational corporations.
Sharon Statement
Drafted by founding members of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), this manifesto outlined the group's principles and inspired young conservatives who would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA)
Legislation introduced by President Reagan and passed by Congress in 1981 that authorized the largest reduction in taxes in the nation's history.
Monica Lewinsky
She was a former White House intern famous for her affair with President Bill Clinton.
Sandra Day O'Connor
She was appointed to the Supreme Court by Reagan in 1981 and was the first woman to serve on the Court. Her votes made the Court more moderate.
Betty Friedan
She was the author of the Feminine Mystique.
My Lai
The 1968 execution by U.S. Army troops of nearly five hundred people in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, including a large number of women and children.
Warren Court
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969), which expanded the Constitution's promise of equality and civil rights. It issued landmark decisions in the areas of civil rights, criminal rights, reproductive freedom, and separation of church and state.
National debt
The cumulative total of all budget deficits.
Sandinistas
The democratically elected group in Nicaragua that President Reagan accused of threatening U.S. business interests. Reagan attempted to overthrow them by ordering the CIA to assist an armed opposition group called the Contras.
Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)
The largest student political organization in the country, whose conservative members defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam.
Deregulation
The limiting of regulation by federal agencies. Deregulation of prices in the trucking, airline, and railroad industries had begun under President Carter in the late 1970s, and Reagan expanded it to include cutting back on government protections of consumers, workers, and the environment.
Globalization
The spread of political, cultural, and economic influences and connections among countries, businesses, and individuals around the world through trade, immigration, communication, and other means.
The Feminine Mystique
The title of an influential book written in 1963 by Betty Friedan critiquing the ideal whereby women were encouraged to confine themselves to roles within the domestic sphere.
National Organization for Women (NOW)
Women's civil rights organization formed in 1966. Initially, it focused on eliminating gender discrimination in public institutions and the workplace, but by the 1970s it also embraced many of the issues raised by more radical feminists.
Equal Pay Act
(1963) Law that established the principle of equal pay for equal work. Trade union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the law.
1968 Democratic National Convention
A 1968 convention held in Chicago during which numerous antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall were tear-gassed and clubbed by police. Inside the convention hall, the delegates were bitterly divided over Vietnam.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey
A 1992 Supreme Court case that upheld a law requiring a twenty-four-hour waiting period prior to an abortion. Although the decision upheld certain restrictions on abortions, it affirmed the "essential holding" in Roe v. Wade (1973) that women had a constitutional right to control their reproduction.
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
A 1993 treaty that eliminated all tariffs and trade barriers among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
USA PATRIOT Act
A 2001 law that gave the government new powers to monitor suspected terrorists and their associates, including the ability to access personal information.
Lawrence v Texas
A 2003 landmark decision by the Supreme Court that limited the power of states to prohibit private homosexual activity between consenting adults.
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
A cartel formed in 1960 by the Persian Gulf states and other oil-rich developing countries that allowed its members to exert greater control over the price of oil.
Reagan coalition
A coalition supporting Ronald Reagan that included the traditional core of Republican Party voters, middle-class suburbanites and migrants to the Sunbelt states, blue-collar Catholics, and a large contingent of southern whites, an electorally key group of former Democrats that had been gradually moving toward the Republican Party since 1964.
World Wide Web
A collection of interlinked computer servers that debuted in 1991, allowing access by millions to documents, pictures, and other materials.
National Review
A conservative magazine founded by editor William F. Buckley in 1955, who used it to criticize liberal policy.
Counterculture
A culture embracing values or lifestyles opposing those of the mainstream culture. Became synonymous with hippies, people who opposed and rejected conventional standards of society and advocated extreme liberalism in their sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles.
HIV/AIDS
A deadly disease that killed nearly a hundred thousand people in the United States in the 1980s.
Proposition 209
A proposition approved by California voters in 1996 that outlawed affirmative action in state employment and public education.
Tea Party
A set of far-right opposition groups that emerged during President Obama's first term and gave voice to the extreme individualism and anti-government sentiment traditionally associated with right-wing movements in the United States.
New Left
A term applied to radical students of the 1960s and 1970s, distinguishing their activism from the Old Left-the communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s who tended to focus on economic and labor questions rather than cultural issues.
Culture war
A term used by Patrick Buchanan in 1992 to describe a long-standing political struggle, dating to the 1920s, between religious traditionalists and secular liberals. Social issues such as abortion rights and the rights of lesbians and gay men divided these groups.
Stonewall Inn
A two-day riot by Stonewall Inn patrons after the police raided the gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village in 1969; the event contributed to the rapid rise of a gay liberation movement.
Reagan Democrats
Blue-collar Catholics from industrialized midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois who were dissatisfied with the direction of liberalism in the 1970s and left the Democratic Party for the Republicans.
Environmentalism
Activist movement begun in the 1960s that was concerned with protecting the environment through activities such as conservation, pollution control measures, and public awareness campaigns. In response to the new environmental consciousness, the federal government staked out a broad role in environmental regulation in the 1960s and the 1970s.
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
An economic stimulus bill passed in 2009, in response to the Great Recession, that provided $787 billion to state and local governments for schools, hospitals, and transportation projects. It was one of the largest single packages of government spending in American history.
Group of Eight (G8)
An international organization of the leading capitalist industrial nations: the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Russia. It largely controlled the world's major international financial organizations: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Contras
An opposition group in Nicaragua that President Reagan ordered the CIA to assist. While Congress banned the CIA and all other government agencies from providing any military support to them, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, Oliver North, used the profits from the Iranian arms deal to assist them, resulting in the Iran-Contra affair.
Hostage crisis
Crisis that began in 1979 after the deposed shah of Iran was allowed into the United States following the Iranian revolution. Iranians broke into the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took sixty-six Americans hostage. It lasted 444 days and contributed to President Carter's reelection defeat.
Chicano Moratorium Committee
Group founded by activist Latinos to protest the Vietnam War.
Saddam Hussein
He invaded Kuwait in 1990 and allowed the UN weapon inspectors to return to Iraq in 1998. He was eventually captured after American troops captured the Iraqi capital.
Robert Kennedy
He prevented Indianapolis from rioting after King's assassination, but he would later be assassinated as he was celebrating his victory in the Democratic California primary.
Contract with America
Initiatives by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia for significant tax cuts, reductions in welfare programs, anticrime measures, and cutbacks in federal regulations.
World Trade Organization (WTO)
International economic body established in 1995 through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to enforce substantial tariff and import quota reductions.
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act
Legislation introduced by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2001 that slashed income tax rates, extended the earned income credit for the poor, and marked the estate tax to be phased out by 2010.
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
Legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996 that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the major welfare program dating to the New Deal era, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provided grants to the states to assist the poor and which limited welfare payments to two years, with a lifetime maximum of five years.
Tet offensive
Major campaign of attacks launched throughout South Vietnam in January 1968 by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. A major turning point in the war, it exposed the credibility gap between official statements and the war's reality, and it shook Americans' confidence in the government.
Operation Rolling Thunder
Massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam authorized by President Johnson in 1965; against expectations, it ended up hardening the will of the North Vietnamese to continue fighting.
Religious Right
Politically active religious conservatives, especially Catholics and evangelical Christians, who became particularly vocal in 1980s against feminism, abortion, and homosexuality and who promoted "family values."
Great Society
President Lyndon B. Johnson's domestic program, which included civil rights legislation, antipoverty programs, government subsidy of medical care, federal aid to education, consumer protection, and aid to the arts and humanities.
Iran-Contra affair
Reagan administration scandal that involved the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for its efforts to secure the release of hostages held in Lebanon and the redirection- illegal because banned by American law- of the proceeds of those sales to the Nicaraguan Contras.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Resolution passed by Congress in 1964 in the wake of naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin between the United States and North Vietnam. It gave the president virtually unlimited authority in conducting the Vietnam War. The Senate terminated the resolution in 1971 following outrage over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Sweeping 2010 health-care reform bill championed by President Obama that established nearly universal health insurance by providing subsidies and compelling larger business to offer coverage to employees.
Silent majority
Term derived from the title of a book by Ben J. Wattengerg and Richard Scammon (called the "Real Majority") and used by Nixon in a 1969 speech to describe those who supported his positions but did not publicly assert their voices, in contrast to those involved in the antiwar, civil rights, and women's movements.
Service industries
Term that includes food, beverage, and tourist industries, financial and medical service industries, and computer technology industries, which were the leading sectors of U.S. growth in the second half of the 1980s. This pattern represented a shift from reliance on the heavy industries of steel, autos, and chemicals.
Détente
The easing of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration, which was achieved by focusing on issues of common concern, such as arms control and trade.
Perestroika
The economic restructuring policy introduced by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s that contributed, unintentionally, to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
Persian Gulf War
The 1991 war between Iraq and a U.S.-led international coalition that was sparked by the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. A forty-day bombing campaign against Iraq followed by coalition troops storming into Kuwait brought a quick coalition victory.
Family values
Values promoted by the Religious Right, including support for the traditional nuclear family and opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.
