Module 10: Civil Unrest - The 1960s and the 1970s

Terrance visits the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. for inspiration

America’s attempt to contain communism led the country into the Vietnam War, a war fought on foreign soil in tropical Vietnam. The war divided the United States. Many Americans supported the war effort and many were opposed. While America was engaged in stopping the spread of communism, the home front experienced many of its own problems. A country founded on democracy, freedom, and equal rights justified ideas like containment and “separate but equal.” Join Martina and Terrance as they guide you through a period in United States history when America was fighting an unwinnable war in Vietnam, dealing with an escalating Cold War, seeing its African American citizens fighting for equal rights at home, living through another presidential assassination, and a major scandal involving his replacement. How will America deal with all of this turmoil?

Getting Started

Spanning your journey through United States history, you likely noticed the reemergence of certain patterns. For example, as early as the Jamestown settlement, and continuing through to your current stop in history with the policy of containment, Americans have harbored various fears toward other groups of people. In this Getting Started, you will create a T-chart that lists America’s fears towards other groups of people and the roots of those fears. The roots of the fears are specific reasons that cause American's to become fearful. T-charts are a type of chart or graphic organizer used to examine two aspects of a topic. For example, T-charts can be used to list the advantages and disadvantages of a topic, or the chart can list things like facts versus opinions.

In your journal, take a moment to create a T-chart like the one shown in the image. Your chart should have two headings, “America’s Fears” and “Roots of America’s Fears.” List at least five of America’s fears, and five causes of those fears.

Once you have completed your journal entry, please save it with a file name of mod10_fears and submit it to the journal dropbox

 

Key Vocabulary

To view the definitions for these key vocabulary terms, visit the course glossary.

 

Bay of Pigs Invasion	Khrushchev, Nikita	Plessy v. Ferguson
Brown v. Board of Education	March on Washington (1963)	Twenty-sixth Amendment
Civil Rights Act of 1964	Marshall, Thurgood	Vietnamization
Cuban Missile Crisis	Massive Resistance	Voting Rights Act of 1965
draft	McCarthyism	Watergate
Hill, Oliver	NAACP