Unit 3 Additional Materials

The period of 1945-1990 represent a time that America had firmly established itself as a world superpower and embraced a leadership position in global politics and finance. On the foreign front, at the end of WWII America sponsored the creation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, two institutions that would revolutionize and dominate world finance throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st as well. Faced with the problem of Soviet Empire and the Iron Curtain, the US stabilized Western Europe and the free market world with programs such as the Marshall Plan, the Containment Policy, and the formation of NATO. The US would engage in a Cold War and an arms race with the Soviet Union and her satellites that would ultimately result in the collapse of the USSR in 1990. On the domestic front, like other post-war nations, Americans saw high taxes and high regulation of the economy by government for decades following WWII. The fifties and early sixties was a period of great prosperity for the US as the GI Bill put millions through college and the middle class moved out to the suburbs. The sixties also witnessed great social revolution with the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism, the rise of a counter-culture, and the growing Vietnam War Protest movement. By the late 1970's, Keynesian economics was beginning to come to an end in America as "stagflation" mired down the economy, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 began a conservative political and economic revolution that deregulated the American economy and brought the nation closer in alignment with free market principals.