American History, 1945-Present Essays Example

1. In the aftermath of World War II, an ideological battle fomented between the Soviet Union and the United States. This hostile and bitter rivalry lasted for almost five decades and ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This war was characterized as a “cold” war because the Soviet Union and the United States never engaged in direct military confrontation. Nonetheless, both world superpowers threatened to annihilate one another through nuclear warfare, which prompted both to participate in so-called proxy wars in which allied nations engaged one another militarily over the threat of communism spreading in places such as Vietnam and South Korea. Cold War discourses described the ideological conflict as a battle that pitted two civilizations against one another. This global clash between Soviet communism and American capitalism would yield only one victor who would prevail. Massive military build-up, technological competition, a perpetual arms race, and espionage coalesced and resulted in the Cold War conflict.
2. The Greensboro sit-ins refer to a litany of nonviolent protests that took place in Greensboro, North Carolina beginning in 1960. The first sit-in took place on February 1, 1960 when four African-American college students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at an all-white lunch counter in a Woolworth’s department store. This series of sit-ins as a form of confrontational politics reversed the policy of racial segregation in the department store chair called Woolworth. Many scholars point to these sit-ins as the final catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. Although sit-ins had taken place in other parts of the United States, the Greensboro sit-in set off a wave of protests that were nonviolent in nature against segregation in the private sector in the U.S. Moreover, the sit-ins led to the creation of SNCC in April 1960, a grassroots organization that developed as a corollary to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King. Ella Baker has been credited as the progenitor of SNCC after calling for a congregation of civil rights leaders and advocates in order “to share experience gained in recent protest demonstrations and to help chart future goals for effective action.” Baker, although less well known than contemporary civil rights leaders, nonetheless played a critical role in the NAACP, MLK’s SCLC, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She played a formative role in organizing student activists who later became critical assets for the civil rights movement to succeed.

Bibliography

Trowbridge, David J. A History of the United States, Volume 2. United States: Flat World Education Inc, 2015. Web.