As a landmark moment in American history, Brown’s significance perhaps lies less in immediate tangible changes—which were slow, partial, and inseparable from a much longer chain of events—than in the idealism it expressed and the momentum it created. The nation’s highest court had attacked one of the fundamental supports of Jim Crow segregation and offered constitutional cover for the creation of one of the greatest social movements in American history.

nited States detonated the first thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb (using fusion explosions of theoretically limitless power) on November 1, 1952. The blast measured over ten megatons and generated an inferno five miles wide with a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high and a hundred miles across. The irradiated debris—fallout—from the blast circled the earth, occasioning international alarm about the effects of nuclear testing on human health and the environment.

The United States entered the war in a crippling economic depression and exited at the beginning of an unparalleled economic boom. The war had been won, the United States was stronger than ever, and Americans looked forward to a prosperous future. And yet new problems loomed. Stalin’s Soviet Union and the proliferation of nuclear weapons would disrupt postwar dreams of global harmony.

In 1932, with the national unemployment average hover-ing around 25 percent, black unemployment reached as high as 50 per-cent, while even black workers who kept their jobs saw their already lowwages cut dramatically.

arge rates of poverty and unparalleled levels of inequality, he couldnot see the weaknesses behind the decade’s economy. Even as the newculture of consumption promoted new freedoms, it also promoted newinsecurities. An economy built on credit exposed the nation to tremen-dous risk. Flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, aconstruction bubble, and an ever-more flooded consumer market loomeddangerously until the Roaring Twenties ground to a halt.

Postwar dis-illusionment shattered Americans’ hopes for the progress of the modernworld. The war came and went, leaving in its place the bloody wreckageof an old world through which the United States traveled to a new anduncertain future

The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that sawworkers’ deaths answered with little punishment of the business own-ers responsible for such dangerous conditions. But as such tragediesmounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequalitygrew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for thisnew modern order.