Period 8: 1945–1980

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published US History course framework for Unit 8. This unit is worth 10–17% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• The Cold War Begins14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the origins of the Cold War and the policy of containment · Analyze how the Cold War shaped American foreign and domestic policy · Describe the impact of anticommunism at home
• The Civil Rights Movement15 min · 3 objectivesTrace the key strategies and milestones of the civil rights movement · Explain the significance of landmark legislation and court decisions · Analyze the tensions between nonviolent and more militant approaches
• The Great Society, Vietnam & the 1970s14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the goals and legacy of Johnson’s Great Society · Analyze the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War · Describe how the war and social movements reshaped American politics
• Containment in Practice — and Its Cost at Home15 min · 3 objectivesExplain containment from the Long Telegram through NSC-68 · Compare the Marshall Plan, Berlin, Korea, and Vietnam as applications of one doctrine · Analyze the Second Red Scare as a domestic consequence of Cold War policy
• The Postwar Order: Suburbs, Affluence, and Who Was Excluded14 min · 3 objectivesExplain how federal policy created postwar suburbanization · Analyze redlining and the GI Bill as engines of the racial wealth gap · Describe critiques of postwar conformity and affluence
• After 1965: Movements, Divergence, and Backlash14 min · 3 objectivesExplain why the movement's focus shifted north and toward economic questions · Compare Black Power, Chicano, American Indian, women's, and gay liberation movements · Analyze the emergence of the New Right and the Silent Majority

Every term in Unit 8

All 40 terms we publish for Period 8: 1945–1980, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Containment

Kennan's doctrine of resisting Soviet expansion wherever it appeared, without direct war. The organizing principle of US policy for forty years.

Truman Doctrine (1947)

Aid to Greece and Turkey, framed as supporting free peoples against subjugation — the open-ended commitment containment implied.

Marshall Plan (1948)

$13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, reviving trading partners and making communism less attractive.

NATO (1949)

Collective-security alliance in which an attack on one is an attack on all — the first US peacetime military alliance.

Korean War (1950–53)

UN and US forces repelled the North; Chinese entry produced stalemate at the 38th parallel. Militarized containment and tripled defense spending.

McCarthyism

Unsubstantiated accusations of communist infiltration that destroyed careers; collapsed after the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Held segregated schools inherently unequal, overturning Plessy in education and providing the legal foundation of the civil rights movement.

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56)

Year-long boycott after Rosa Parks's arrest that desegregated the buses and made King a national figure.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

King's organization using churches as the base for nonviolent direct action across the South.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Youth-led group from the 1960 sit-ins, driving Freedom Rides and voter registration; later turned toward Black Power.

Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

King's answer to white moderates: justice delayed is justice denied, and unjust laws carry a moral duty of disobedience.

Civil Rights Act (1964)

Banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment by race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and created the EEOC.

Voting Rights Act (1965)

Suspended literacy tests and sent federal examiners into resistant counties. Black registration in Mississippi rose from about 7% to nearly 60% in two years.

Great Society

Johnson's program — Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, federal education aid, immigration reform — the largest expansion of federal social policy since the New Deal.

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

Thirteen days at the edge of nuclear war, resolved by a naval quarantine and a secret trade of Turkish missiles. Led to the hotline and the test-ban treaty.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)

Gave Johnson open-ended authority to use force in Vietnam without a declaration of war; later shown to rest on a disputed incident.

Tet Offensive (1968)

A military defeat for the North that nonetheless destroyed American confidence in official optimism and widened the credibility gap.

Vietnamization

Nixon's policy of transferring combat to South Vietnamese forces while withdrawing US troops and escalating bombing.

The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Friedan's book naming the dissatisfaction of educated suburban housewives; helped launch second-wave feminism and NOW.

Title IX (1972)

Barred sex discrimination in federally funded education, transforming women's access to athletics and professional programs.

Roe v. Wade (1973)

Recognized a constitutional right to abortion under privacy, with a trimester framework. Overturned in 2022.

Stonewall (1969)

Riots against a police raid on a New York gay bar, conventionally marking the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

Environmental Protection Agency (1970)

Created under Nixon after Silent Spring and the first Earth Day; enforced the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Watergate

Break-in and cover-up that produced US v. Nixon, forced the first presidential resignation and led to campaign finance and oversight reform.

Stagflation

Simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment in the 1970s, driven by oil shocks and wage-price spirals. It discredited the Keynesian consensus.

OPEC oil embargo (1973)

Arab oil producers cut supply after US support for Israel; prices quadrupled, exposing American energy dependence.

Long Telegram

Kennan's 1946 analysis of Soviet conduct as driven by internal insecurity and ideology, calling for firm patient resistance at key points — containment in its original selective form.

NSC-68 (1950)

Militarized and globalized containment, urging a permanent arms buildup and treating communist gains anywhere as threats. Kennan objected to what his idea had become.

Berlin airlift (1948–49)

Eleven months of Western supply flights defeated the Soviet blockade without war and led directly to the founding of NATO.

Truman fires MacArthur (1951)

Dismissal for publicly challenging limits on the Korean War, asserting civilian control of the military at real political cost.

Army-McCarthy hearings (1954)

Televised hearings that exposed McCarthy's methods to a mass audience and ended his influence; the Senate censured him that December.

Venona decrypts

Decoded Soviet cables later confirming that some espionage in the 1940s was real — which is why the Red Scare is better analyzed as disproportionate response than pure fantasy.

Détente

Nixon and Kissinger's policy of managed rivalry: the opening to China, SALT I and the ABM Treaty, grain sales. Containment adjusted to limited resources, eroding after Afghanistan in 1979.

GI Bill (1944)

Tuition, low-cost mortgages and business loans for sixteen million veterans. Formally universal, its housing and education benefits were far harder for Black veterans to use.

Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956)

Ninety percent federal funding for 41,000 miles of interstate, enabling suburban commuting — and frequently routed through Black urban neighborhoods, destroying them.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

Held racially restrictive covenants judicially unenforceable, though private discrimination in housing continued until the Fair Housing Act and long after.

Kerner Commission (1968)

Federal report on urban uprisings concluding the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal," and naming white racism as the cause.

Poor People's Campaign

King's late turn to economic justice — a multiracial movement for jobs and income — reflecting his judgment that legal equality without economic power was insufficient.

United Farm Workers grape boycott

Chávez and Huerta's national consumer boycott that won contracts for California farmworkers, applying civil rights tactics to labor organizing.

Proposition 13 (1978)

California initiative capping property taxes, which showed the political force of tax revolt and became a template for the conservative turn of the 1980s.

What examiners penalize here

• Connect Vietnam back to **containment** and the **domino theory**: the U.S. fought to stop communism from spreading in Southeast Asia. Framing Vietnam as containment applied (and overextended) links Period 8 into one coherent Cold War argument.
• A high-scoring Cold War essay distinguishes **Kennan's containment** (selective, political, economic) from **NSC-68 containment** (global, military, undifferentiated). Almost every later controversy — Korea, Vietnam, arms racing — sits in the gap between them, and naming that gap is the sophistication point.

Practice US History

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 9 units of AP United States History

1. Unit 1 · Period 1: 1491–1607
2. Unit 2 · Period 2: 1607–1754
3. Unit 3 · Period 3: 1754–1800
4. Unit 4 · Period 4: 1800–1848
5. Unit 5 · Period 5: 1844–1877
6. Unit 6 · Period 6: 1865–1898
7. Unit 7 · Period 7: 1890–1945
8. Unit 8 · Period 8: 1945–1980
9. Unit 9 · Period 9: 1980–Present