Unit 3: Conflict, Compromise, and Change

Grade 9 United states history from 1877 Unit 3: Conflict, Compromise, and Change • 1939 - 1968

World War II commands careful attention. Although it was not the bloodiest in American history, the war solidified the nation’s role as a global power and ushered in social changes that established reform agendas that would preoccupy public discourse in the United States for the remainder of the 20th century. The role of the United States in World War II was important for its defense of democracy in the face of totalitarian aggression. More Americans fought abroad than ever before, not only helping to win the war but also bringing a new cosmopolitanism home with them. Again war was an engine of social and cultural change. In this war, Americans of diverse backgrounds lived and fought together, fostering American identity and building notions of a common future. Similarly, on the home front, public education and the mass media promoted nationalism and the blending of cultural backgrounds.

The Cold War set the framework for global politics for 45 years after the end of World War II. The Cold War so strongly influenced our domestic politics, the conduct of foreign affairs, and the role of the government in the economy after 1945 that it is important to examine its origins and the forces behind its continuation into the late 20th century. The Soviet Union had specific goals following World War II. Its catastrophic losses in the war and fear of rapid German recovery were factors in Soviet demands for a sphere of influence on its western borders, achieved through the establishment of governments under Soviet military and political control. The American policy of containment was successfully conducted in Europe: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, NATO, and the maintenance of U.S. military forces in Europe under what was called the nuclear “balance of terror.”

Although the study of the era following World War II can easily be dominated by a preoccupation with the Cold War, our understanding of the present-day United States will be deficient without grappling with the remarkable changes in American society, the economy, and American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. It should be remembered that the closeness of the period makes it one of continuing reinterpretation, reminding us that historical judgments should be seen as provisional, never cut in stone.

The postwar economic boom, greatly affected by the transforming role of science, produced great changes in American education, the rise of consumer culture, and suburbanization. The return to domesticity for many women, the character of corporate life, and sexual and cultural mores, involved startling changes in dress, speech, music, film and television, family structure, uses of leisure time, and more.

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