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| President Hoover's administration initiated a new approach to relations with other nations in the Western Hemisphere. The Good Neighbor policy declared America's intention to disclaim the right to intervention pronounced in the Platt Amendment and the Roosevelt Corollary. |
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| Fascist prime minister who came to power in 1922 and ruled Italy as an absolute dictator. In many ways, Mussolini served as an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, with whom he chose to ally himself during World War II. In 1943, Mussolini was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by some of his subordinates, and in 1945 he was executed by Italian partisans just prior to the end of the war in Europe. |
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| Chancellor and self-proclaimed Führer, or “leader,” of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. After a rapid political ascent as the leader of the far-right Nazi Party in the 1920s, Hitler achieved absolute power and maintained it throughout his time as chancellor. During his rule, he took a very active role in the government of Germany, making military decisions and implementing edicts regarding the treatment of Jews and other minorities, such as the notorious “final solution” that condemned Jews to death at concentration camps in German-controlled parts of Europe. Just before Germany surrendered in 1945, Hitler committed suicide together with his wife, Eva Braun, in his bunker in Berlin. |
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| At a conference in Munich, Germany, in 1938, Britain and France yielded to Hitler's demands and persuaded Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland to Germany. It was looked upon by some as an act of appeasement that merely encouraged further German aggression. |
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| Reacting to their disillusionment with World War I and absorbed in the domestic crisis of the depression, Americans backed Congress's several neutrality acts in the 1930s. The 1935 act forbade loans or the sale of munitions to belligerents in a war. Later, the embargo on munitions was expanded to include civil wars. |
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| Willkie led the private-business community's opposition to the TVA. In 1940 he was the Republican nominee to oppose Franklin Roosevelt's bid for reelection to a third term. He focused his unsuccessful campaign on the president's increasingly interventionist foreign policy. |
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| At a meeting in August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill developed the Atlantic Charter, a statement of common principles and war aims.the Atlantic charter was a joint statement of their war aims that called for self determination, free trade, and freedom of the seas, equal access to raw materials and a new system of collective security |
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| In this alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan signed in September 1941, each nation agreed to help the others in the event of an attack by the United States. |
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| The collective term for Germany, Italy, and Japan’s military alliance in opposition to the Allied Powers. Several smaller countries in Eastern Europe also became members of the Axis Powers temporarily. |
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| Office of Price Administration |
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| This federal agency during World War II fixed price ceilings on all commodities, controlled rents in defense areas, and rationed scarce goods such as sugar, fuel, and automobile tires. |
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| a top secret government program to develop the atomic bomb during world war 2.It initiated the age of nuclear weaponry |
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| A World War II hero and former supreme commander of NATO who became U.S. president in 1953 after easily defeating Democratic opponent Adlai E. Stevenson. Eisenhower expanded New Deal–era social welfare programs such as Social Security and passed the landmark Federal Highway Act to improve national transportation. However, he cut back funding to other domestic programs to halt what he called “creeping socialism.” His New Look at foreign policy, meanwhile, emphasized nuclear weapons and the threat of massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in order to cut costs and deter the USSR from spreading Communism abroad. Eisenhower committed federal dollars to fighting Communists in Vietnam, resolved the Suez crisis, and authorized CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala. |
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| The code name for the Allied invasion of France in 1944, which commenced on the beaches of Normandy and ultimately was successful in liberating France and pushing German forces back east to their own territory. |
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| A battle from June 3–6, 1942, in which U.S. naval forces severely disabled the Japanese fleet at Midway Island in the Pacific. Coming close on the heels of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway forced Japan into defensive mode and turned the tide of the war in the Pacific theater. |
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| Five-star American general who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, MacArthur led the American occupation in Japan, helped establish a democratic government there, and in large part rewrote the country's new constitution outlawing militarism. He later commanded United Nations forces in Korea, driving North Korean forces back north of the 38th parallel after making the brilliant Inchon landing. He ignored Chinese warnings not to approach the North Korean–Chinese border at the Yalu River, however, and was subsequently driven back down to the 38th parallel by more than a million Chinese troops. President Harry S Truman later rejected MacArthur's request to bomb North Korea and China with nuclear weapons. MacArthur's public criticism of the president's decision prompted Truman to remove him from command in 1951. |
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| Randolph was an African American leader and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. In 1941 he threatened a march on Washington if black workers where not guaranteed equal employment opportunities. President Roosevelt responded with Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination in hiring for plants with defense contracts. |
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| Zoot suiters were Mexican-born residents in the United States during World War II who wore a distinctive costume consisting of a broad-brimmed hat, long suit coat, and peg-legged pants. American servicemen in cities like Los Angeles sometimes attacked gangs of zoot suiters. |
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| alta, a city in the Russian Crimea, hosted a wartime conference in February 1945, where U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met. The Allies agreed to final plans for the defeat of Germany and the terms of its occupation. The Soviets agreed to allow free elections in Poland, but the elections were never held. |
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| At Potsdam, Germany, in April 1945, Allied leaders divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones, agreed to try Nazi leaders as war criminals, and planned the exacting of reparations from Germany. In the Potsdam Declaration, the United States also declared its intention to democratize the Japanese political system and reintroduce Japan into the international community and gave Japan an opening for surrender. |
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| A U.S. foreign policy doctrine that argued that the Soviet Union needed to be “contained” to prevent the spread of Communism throughout the world. First formulated by State Department analyst George Kennan during the Truman administration, it suggested that the United States needed to fight Communism abroad and promote democracy (or at least anti-Communist regimes) worldwide. Policy makers tied it closely with the domino theory. Kennan's idea eventually developed into the single most important tenet of American foreign policy through the Cold War until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. |
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| A term coined by Winston Churchill for the area of Eastern Europe controlled indirectly by the USSR, usually through puppet governments. This area was cut off from noncommunist Europe. |
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| A doctrine articulated by President Harry S Truman that pledged American support for all “free peoples” fighting Communist aggression from foreign or domestic sources. Truman announced the doctrine in 1947, then convinced Congress to grant Greece and Turkey $400 million to help fight pro-Soviet insurgents. Besides committing the United States to the policy of containment, the language of the Truman Doctrine itself help characterize the Cold War as a conflict between good and evil. |
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| A plan devised by President Harry S Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall that committed over $10 billion to rebuilding Western Europe after World War II. Although the Soviet Union fiercely opposed the plan, Truman knew that rebuilding the region would provide stability and prevent another world war. The Marshall Plan was highly successful and enabled British, French, Italian, and German factories to exceed prewar production levels within just a few years. |
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| The dropping of thousands of tons of food and medical supplies to starving West Berliners after Joseph Stalin closed off all highway and railway access to the city in mid-1948. Stalin hoped to cut off British, French, and American access to the conquered German city, but President Harry S Truman, determined not to lose face or the city, ordered American military planes to drop provisions from the air. The blockade was foiled, and Stalin finally lifted it in 1949. |
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| An organization formed in 1949 that bound the United States, Canada, most of Western Europe, and later Greece and Turkey together in a mutual pact of defense against the USSR and Eastern bloc countries. The treaty had the additional effect of permanently tying American interests to political and economic stability in Europe. |
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| A pact signed by the USSR and Eastern European countries under Soviet influence in 1955. By signing the pact, they pledged mutual defense in response to the formation of NATO. |
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| A classified 1950 proposal that the United States quadruple defense and military spending in order to counter the Soviet threat. NSC-68 set a precedent for increasing defense spending throughout the Cold War, especially after North Korean forces attacked South Korea in June 1950. |
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| House Un-American Activities Committee |
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| A committee established in 1938 by the House of Representatives to investigate individual Americans or organizations who might be linked to the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. After World War II, as fear of the Soviet Union spread, HUAC was used to investigate those suspected of having ties to Communism or of being Soviet agents. Congressman Richard M. Nixon played a key role on the committee and used his power to prosecute many, including federal employee Alger Hiss in 1950. |
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| Longtime government employee who, in 1948, was accused by Time editor Whitaker Chambers of spying for the USSR. After a series of highly publicized hearings and trials, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to five years imprisonment, emboldening conservatives to redouble their efforts to root out subversives within the government. |
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| Ethel and Julius Rosenberg |
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| In the early 1950s, the Rosenbergs were accused of espionage and supplying atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. They were tried, convicted, and executed. |
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| The extreme anticommunism in American politics and society during the early 1950s. The term derives from the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led an intense campaign against alleged subversives during this period. |
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| McCarran Internal Security Act |
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| In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Act making participation in any effort to create a totalitarian government in America illegal, required the registration of all communist organizations, banned suspected communists from defense work, and denied immigration to anyone from a communist country. |
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| Illinois Governor Stevenson was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1952 and 1956. He later was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban missile crisis. |
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