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the age of the Americas

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1950s: the United States takes on a particularly important role in shaping world history

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1920s was important for the United States, but most of that was commercial and cultural

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in the 1940s, the United States becomes exceptionally important militarily and politically

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1940-1954: formative period

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1940: after the fall of France, the United States declares a national emergency and begins mobilizing on a mass scale to participate in global war

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1954: United States has decided that it is going to have a global strategy of maintaining communism all over the world

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began to make domestic decisions in order to play a global leadership role

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1954: Brown v. Board of Education

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this began a second reconstruction of the southern part of its country

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America as world power

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by 1898, America had become an important power among many other powers, but by no means a dominant one

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during the 1940s, the United States emerged as a lead world power, in some cases, the lead world power

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became a national security state

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"national security" was a phrase people didn't use until the 1940s

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security is about more than the size of the army and the navy

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after 1945, the United States began demobilizing, was tempted to become the way it was before the 1940s

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but then the rise of the Cold War propelled the United States to get back into preparing for world war

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the 40s and the 50s are the formative years of the national security state

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1947: United States Air Force

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1947: National Security Council

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1947: Joint Chiefs of Staff

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1947: CIA

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1949: created the Department of Defense

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this was an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947

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1952: National Security Agency

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begins defending frontiers designed to limit the spread of communism

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Europe

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Asia

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America as economic model

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became the leading model for the practice of social democracy

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big business, big unions, and a big government umpiring it all

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becomes the leading spokescountry for free trade

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this is an irony because from the late 1800s to the 1930s, America had been a protectionist country

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Britain had been the free-trade country but then abandoned the doctrines of free trade at the beginning of the 1930s

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domestic transformation

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integration of the South into the national economy

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it's hard for us to remember this now, but in the 1920s and well into the 1930s, the American South was regarded as the substantially unreconstructed backward backwater of American society, weaker education, oppression of the Negros, a kind of benighted, colorful place, fit for the fiction of William Faulkner but hardly for imitation in the rest of the country

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but hardly for imitation in the rest of the country

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industries weak

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economic growth modest,

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its laborers, mainly black, trapped in an almost sort of serfdom, sharecropping on their tenant plots

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many of the best workers increasingly able to free themselves from this kind of peonage, leaving it, and migrating in large numbers to work in factories in the North

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changes in 1930s, 1940s

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Roosevelt's New Deal

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opportunities of the War

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Southern businesses began to participate in the national labor and capital markets

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cities like Atlanta and Houston are growing tremendously

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from 1940-1970, Houston adds 1 million people

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from cotton to international oil and petrochemicals

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the rise of the Western United States

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California

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in 1930 was quite small

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today 34 million people and one of the largest economies of the world

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a lot of it because of U.S. defense industry

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since 1930, population of West increased significantly

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took on the legacy of African slavery inside the country

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had been freed but were being kept in a state of profound legal discrimination and systematic oppression

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why the 1940s, why the 1950s did a second reconstruction of American South begin?

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not a coincidence that it begins at this time

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you can't separate this from what is going on in world history

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the United States had just mobilized the whole country to destroy a tyranny based on racial prejudice

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this bounced back on people in a myriad of ways on people through the United States in the way American then viewed the heritage of racial prejudice inside their own country

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you can see the erosion of the old established American positions on race

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1948: integration of blacks in the armed forces

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1954: Brown v. Board of Education, Supreme Court votes 9-0 to integrate schools

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1955: boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama by black American who refused to provide financial support to a bus system that treated them as second-class citizens

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the second reconstruction of the South was not a foregone conclusion

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there is a complex, twisting story, based much on key decisions at key times

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corrected:

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Montgomrey

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Montgomery