ISSUES TO UNDERSTAND: Think about these issues before, during, and
after the reading you do. If you understand their complexity and
feel confident in using information from the text and the supplementary
reading, you should understand the period well.
1. The importance of the 1960 sit-ins and the books of muckraking authors
Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan.
2. The election of 1960; candidates, issues, role of television, outcome.
3. President John F. Kennedy's record in civil-rights and domestic
reform.
4. How the civil-rights movement induced the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
and Congress to use federal authority to end legally enforced segregation,
disfranchisement, and discrimination.
5. President Kennedy's record in foreign affairs.
6. How and why Kennedy deepened America's involvement in Vietnam.
7. Major legislation passed to implement the Johnson administration's
Great Society and war on poverty programs.
8. The election of 1964; candidates, issues, outcome.
9. Why in his second term Lyndon Johnson went from electoral triumph
to widespread rejection by the American people.
10. The major decisions handed down by the Supreme Court in the 1960s;
why
11. The New Left and Students for a Democratic Society; who was involved,
what they stood for, their activities, their achievements, the backlash
against them.
12. Causes of the decline of student radicalism.
13. The 1960s youth counterculture; its beginnings, values, dress,
music, and waning.
14. Causes and results of and reactions against the sexual revolution
of the 1960s and the 1970s.
15. Results of the Tet offensive in Vietnam and in the United States.
16. Why President Johnson decided not to run for another term in 1968.
17. Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and what resulted from
it.
18. The election of 1968; candidates, issues, violence surrounding
it, emergence of a new conservative majority.
19. Nixon, Kissinger, and the policy of Vietnamization.
20. How the Vietnam war ended, its costs to the United States and Indochina.
21. Foreign policy of the Nixon administrations; establishment of the
diplomatic relations with China, detente with Russia, application of realpolitik
in the Middle East and the Third World.
22. The Nixon administration's domestic record; the economy, civil
rights, social welfare, judicial appointments, use of law enforcement and
other federal agencies.
23. Reasons for Nixon's triumph in the 1972 election.
24. The Watergate break-in and cover-up and Nixon's downfall.
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