Term | Definition |
Baby boom | Increase in births between 1945 and 1964 |
Consumerism | Large-scale buying, much of it on credit |
Nuclear family | Ideal or typical household with a father, mother, and children |
Space race | The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop the technology to successfully land on the moon |
Blacklist | List of persons who were not hired because of suspected communist ties |
Interstate Highway Act | 1956 law that authorized the spending of $32 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway |
Mutually assured destruction | Policy in which the United States and the Soviet Union hoped to deter nuclear war by building up enough weapons to destroy one another |
Brinkmanship | Belief that only by going to the brink of war could the United States protect itself against communist aggression |
Iron Curtain | Term coined by Winston Churchill to describe the border between the Soviet satellite States and Western Europe |
NATO | Military alliance formed to counter Soviet expansion |
Warsaw Pact | Military alliance of the Soviet Union and its satellite States |
Eisenhower Doctrine | Policy of president Eisenhower that stated that the United States would use force to help any nation threatened by communism |
Truman Doctrine | President Truman's promise to help nations struggling against communist movements |
Arms Race | Contest in which nations compete to build more powerful weapons |
38th Parallel | Is a circle of latitude that is 38 degrees north |
Limited war | War fought to achieve only specific goals |
Marshall plan | Foreign policy that offered economic aid to Western Europe countries after World War II |
Cold War | Worldwide rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union |
Satellite state | Independent nation under the control of a more powerful nation |
ICBM | |