CLASS NOTES: Post WWII: The Age of America (The Modern World: Global History since 1760)

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Notes on video lecture:

Post WWII: The Age of America

The Modern World: Global History since 1760

Prof. Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia

Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on June 18, 2014 (go to class or lectures)

Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

benighted, racial, coincidence, 1930s, South, social, Security, the, Houston, North, Negros, cultural, foregone, small, Cold, segregated, backwater, serfdom, umpiring, Chiefs, communism, Roosevelt, petrochemicals, France, erosion, security, exceptionally, national, protectionist, imitation, world, 9-0, dominant, oppression, demobilizing, Defense

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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 history

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

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

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1940-1954: formative period

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1940: after the fall of , 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 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 one

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

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became a national state

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" 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 , was tempted to become the way it was before the 1940s

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but then the rise of the 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 Council

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1947: Joint of Staff

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1947: CIA

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1949: created the Department of

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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 democracy

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big business, big unions, and a big government 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 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

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domestic transformation

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integration of the 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 of American society, weaker education, oppression of the , a kind of , 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 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 , 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

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changes in 1930s, 1940s

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'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 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

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the rise of the Western United States

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California

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in 1930 was quite

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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

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

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not a 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 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 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 to integrate schools

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1955: boycott of the 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 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

Vocabulary:

peonage, n. system by which debtors are bound in servitude to their creditors until their debts are paid ⇒ "During the 1910s and 1920s, Africans in the American South were able to increasingly free themselves from this kind of peonage."

benighted, adj. lacking knowledge or education, unenlightened ⇒ "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."

Ideas and Concepts:

On the pre-WWII American South via tonight's World History class: "After World War II, if the United States was going to become a global economic leader, it was going to have to integrate the South into the national economy. 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 Negroes, a kind of benighted, colorful place, fit for the fiction of William Faulkner but hardly for imitation in the rest of the country. Its industries weak, its economic growth modest, its laborers, mainly black, trapped in an almost sort of serfdom, sharecropping on their tenant plots, with 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."

On why the American South had to be reconstructed a second time and why it happened in the 1940s and 1950s, via tonight's World History class: "If the United States was going to become a world leader after WWII, it was going to have to take on the legacy of African slavery inside its own borders. Slaves had been technically freed in the American South in the 19th century but even up until the middle of the 20th century, they were being kept in a state of profound legal discrimination and systematic oppression. It wasn't a coincidence that the second reconstruction of the American South begins to take root in the 1940s and the 1950s. You can't separate this movement from what is going on in world history. The United States had just mobilized the whole country to destroy a tyranny based on racial prejudice, and this began to bounce back on people in a myriad of ways throughout the United States regarding the view Americans took on the heritage of racial prejudice inside their own country. You can see a tight correlation between World War II and the erosion of the old established American positions on racial segregation and suppression:1948:the integration of blacks in the Armed Forces, 1954:Brown v. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court votes 9-0 to racially integrate all schools in the country, and 1955:the boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama by black Americans who simply refused to continue to provide financial support to a bus system that treated them as second-class citizens."