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History test 23-25
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Great Depression | Worst economic downturn in American history; it was spurred by the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 and lasted until the Second World War. |
| Dust Bowl | Vast area of the Midwest where windstorms blew away millions of tons of topsoil from parched farmland after a long drought in the 1930s, causing great social distress and a massive migration of farm families. |
| Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) (1932) | Federal program established under President Hoover to loan money to banks and other corporations to help them avoid bankruptcy. |
| Bonus Expeditionary Force (1932) | Protest march on Washington, D.C., by thousands of military veterans and their families, calling for immediate payment of their service bonus certificates; violence ensued when President Herbert Hoover ordered their tent villages cleared. |
| First New Deal | Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambitious first-term cluster of economic and social programs designed to combat the Great Depression. |
| Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) (1933) | Independent government agency, established to prevent bank panics, that guarantees the safety of deposits in citizens’ savings accounts. |
| Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (1934) | Federal agency established to regulate the issuance and trading of stocks and bonds in an effort to avoid financial panics and stock market crashes. |
| National Recovery Administration (NRA) (1933) | Controversial federal agency that brought together business and labor leaders to create “codes of fair competition” and “fair-labor” policies, including a national minimum wage. |
| Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) | Legislation that paid farmers to produce less in order to raise crop prices for all; the AAA was later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Butler (1936). |
| Second New Deal | Expansive cluster of legislation proposed by P. Roosevelt that established new regulatory agencies, strengthened the rights of workers to organize unions, and laid the foundation of a federal social welfare system through the creation of Social Security. |
| Wagner Act 1935 | Legislation that guaranteed workers the right to organize unions, granted them direct bargaining power, and barred employers from interfering with union activities. |
| Social Security act 1935 | Legislation enacted to provide federal assistance to retired workers through tax-funded pension payments and benefit payments to the unemployed and disabled. |
| Works Progress Administration (1935) | Government agency established to manage several federal job programs created under the New Deal; it became the largest employer in the nation. |
| Fascism | A radical form of totalitarian government that emerged in 1920s Italy and Germany in which a dictator uses propaganda and brute force to seize control of all aspects of national life. |
| Neutrality Laws | Series of laws passed by Congress aimed at avoiding a Second World War; these included the Neutrality Act of 1935, which banned the selling of weapons to warring nations. |
| Axis Alliance | Military alliance formed in 1937 by the three major fascist powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. |
| blitzkrieg | The German “lightning war” strategy characterized by swift, well-organized attacks using infantry, tanks, and warplanes. |
| Lend-Lease Act | Legislation that allowed the president to lend or lease military equipment to any country whose own defense was deemed vital to the defense of the United States. |
| Atlantic Charter | Joint statement crafted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill that listed the war goals of the Allied Powers. |
| Pearl Habor | Surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, which prompted the immediate American entry into the war. |
| War Production War | Federal agency created by Roosevelt in 1942 that converted America’s industrial output to war production. |
| Womens Army Corporation | Women’s branch of the U.S. Army; by the end of the Second World War, nearly 150,000 women had served in the WAC. |
| Tuskegee Airmen | U.S. Army Air Corps unit of African American pilots whose combat success spurred military and civilian leaders to desegregate the armed forces after the war. |
| bracero program | System that permitted seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to work in the United States on yearlong contracts. |
| War relocation camps | Detention camps housing thousands of Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were forcibly interned from 1942 until the end of the Second World War. |
| Yalta Conference | Meeting of the “Big Three” Allied leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin—to discuss how to divide control of postwar Germany and eastern Europe. |
| Holocaust | Systematic efforts by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe, resulting in the murder of over 6 million Jews and more than a million other “undesirables.” |
| Battle of Midway | A 1942 battle that proved to be the turning point in the Pacific front during World War II; it was the Japanese navy’s first major defeat in 350 years |
| Hiroshima | Japanese port city that was the first target of the newly developed atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Most of the city was destroyed. |
| Operation Overload | The Allies’ assault on Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall,” a seemingly impregnable series of fortifications and minefields along the French coastline that German forces had created using captive Europeans for laborers. |
| McCarthyism | Anti-Communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts attacking the loyalty of politicians, federal employees, and public figures, despite a lack of evidence. |
| House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) | Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives formed in 1938; originally tasked with investigating Nazi subversion during the Second World War and later focused on rooting out Communists in the government and the motion-picture industry. |
| Dixiecrats | Breakaway faction of White southern Democrats who defected from the national Democratic party in 1948 to protest the party’s increased support for Black civil rights and to nominate their own segregationist candidates for elective office |
| Fair Deal | President Truman’s proposals to build upon the New Deal with national health insurance, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, new civil rights legislation, and other initiatives; most were rejected by the Republican-controlled Congress. |
| Taft-Hartley Labor Act | Congressional legislation that banned “unfair labor practices” by unions, required union leaders to sign anti-Communist “loyalty oaths,” and prohibited federal employees from going on strike. |
| NSC-68 | Top-secret policy paper approved by President Truman that outlined a militaristic approach to combating the spread of global communism. |
| North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) | Congressional legislation that created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. |
| Berlin Airlift | Effort by the United States and Great Britain to fly massive amounts of food and supplies into West Berlin in response to the Soviet land blockade of the city. |
| Marshall Plan | Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s post–World War II program providing massive U.S. financial and technical assistance to war-torn European countries. |
| Truman Doctrine | President Truman’s program of “containing” communism in Eastern Europe and providing economic and military aid to any nations at risk of Communist takeover. |
| Containment | U.S. cold war strategy to exert political, economic, and, if necessary, military pressure on global Soviet expansion as a means of combating the spread of communism. |
| Iron Curtain | Term coined by Winston Churchill to describe the cold war divide between Western Europe and the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellite nations. |
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