Senator Barack Obama had only been a member of the Illinois state senate when Congress debated the war actions, but he had publicly denounced the war, predicting the sectarian violence that would ensue, and remained critical of the invasion through his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. He began running for president almost immediately after arriving in Washington.

Reagan left office in 1988 with the Cold War waning and the economy booming. Unemployment had dipped to 5 percent by 1988.80 Between 1981 and 1986, gas prices fell from $1.38 per gallon to 95¢.81 The stock market recovered from the crash, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average—which stood at 950 in 1981—reached 2,239 by the end of Reagan’s second term.82 Yet the economic gains of the decade were unequally distributed. The top fifth of households enjoyed rising incomes while the rest stagnated or declined.83 In constant dollars, annual chief executive officer (CEO) pay rose from $3 million in 1980 to roughly $12 million during Reagan’s last year in the White House.84 Between 1985 and 1989 the number of Americans living in poverty remained steady at thirty-three million.85 Real per capita money income grew at only 2 percent per year, a rate roughly equal to the Carter years.86 The American economy saw more jobs created than lost during the 1980s, but half of the jobs eliminated were in high-paying industries.87 Furthermore, half of the new jobs failed to pay wages above the poverty line. The economic divide was most acute for African Americans and Latinos, one third of whom qualified as poor.

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.