U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam in March 1965, and the American ground war began. But no matter how many troops the Americans sent or how many bombs they dropped, they could not win. This was a different kind of war. Progress was not measured by cities won or territory taken but by body counts and kill ratios.

The United States established the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, and installed a prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, known to be friendly to United States interests.

The Soviet Union backed many nationalist movements across the globe, but the United States feared the expansion of communist influence and pledged to confront any revolutions that seemed to attack Western capitalism.

The rapid growth of home ownership and the rise of suburban communities helped drive the postwar economic boom.

the United Auto Workers became a force in Detroit, striking General Motors for 113 days in 1945.

A rapidly-expanding American middle class looked for a place of their own in the suburbs

The Jim Crow South tenaciously defended segregation, but throughout America blacks and other minorities suffered discrimination and had fewer options to improve their lives.

In June 1948 the U.S.S.R. blockaded the city, cutting off rail and road access to the three zones of West Berlin it did not control in an effort to gain control over the entire city.

At the Potsdam Conference, held on the outskirts of Berlin from mid-July to early August, the Allies debated the fate of Poland, which the Red Army had liberated from German control and then occupied. Toward the end of the meeting, the American delegation received word that Manhattan Project scientists had successfully tested an atomic bomb. On July 24, when Truman told Stalin about a “new weapon of unusual destructive force,” the Soviet leader simply nodded his acknowledgment and said that he hoped the Americans would make “good use” of it. Stalin had been one of the Bolsheviks who had led the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Civil War that followed, and he clearly remembered that the United States had intervened militarily against the Red Army, and when the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 the U.S. refused to recognize it. The two powers had been brought together in World War II only by their common enemy, and without that common enemy there was little hope for cooperation.

“World communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue,”

The new German strategy used tanks, planes, and motorized infantry to concentrate forces, smash front lines, and wreak havoc behind the enemy’s defenses. It was called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

And even if Americans had wanted to intervene, their military was lacking.

Japan invaded China itself in July 1937, two years before Germany invaded Poland. Chinese attention had been focused on a civil war between the Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party since 1927 and the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek had ignored the Japanese threat until it was too late

Ideologically, the Japanese justified their conquests by claiming they were liberating Asia from European colonialism. Not all the Asian countries they invaded, however, were happy to become part of the Pan-Asian empire Japan wanted to rule over.

But Turner worried about the future

Beginners could expect to earn around $25 per month, and those with years of experience might earn $40. Trail bosses might earn $50 per month. But it was tough work. On a cattle drive, cowboys worked long hours and faced extremes of heat, cold, and intense blowing dust. They subsisted on limited diets with irregular supplies.

Cattle drives were difficult work for the crews who managed the herds

On the northern Plains, the so-called Sioux people had yet to fully surrender. Following Red Cloud’s War, a rare victory for the Plains people, the U.S. government signed the second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and created the Great Sioux Reservation. In 1874, an American expedition led by George Armstrong Custer to protect Northern Pacific Railway survey crews discovered gold in the Black Hills. White prospectors flooded the area around Deadwood gulch, deep in the western region of the Reservation. Aware that U.S. citizens were violating treaty provisions but unwilling to prevent them from searching for gold, federal officials pressured the western tribes to sign a new treaty transferring control of the Black Hills to the United States while General Philip Sheridan quietly moved troops into the region.