Reeling from the war’s growing unpopularity, on March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek reelection to a second full term. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy battled for the Democratic Party nomination. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago erupted into violence.

To Americans in 1968, the country seemed to be unraveling. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968. He had reflected on his own mortality during a rally the night before. Confident that the civil rights movement would succeed without him, he brushed away fears of death. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said, “and I’ve seen the promised land.”

The feminist movement also grew in the 1960s. Women were active in both the civil rights movement and the labor movement, but their increasing awareness of gender inequality led women began to form a movement of their own.

Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

By the late 1960s, a radicalized SNCC, led by figures such as Stokely Carmichael, had expelled its white members and moved on from interracial efforts in the South, focusing instead on problems in northern cities. SNCC activists became frustrated with institutional tactics and turned away from the organization’s founding principle of nonviolence.

Diem’s government, however, lacked popular support and could not contain the communist insurgency seeking the reunification of Vietnam. The U.S. provided weapons and support, but South Vietnam failed to defeat Vietcong insurgents.

The Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Acts, and the War on Poverty provoked conservative resistance and were catalysts for the rise of Republicans in the South and West.

In 1946 for example, the Soviet Union refused to cede parts of occupied Iran, a Soviet defector betrayed a Soviet spy who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and the United States refused Soviet calls to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Diplomat George Kennan warned that Americans shoul

Officials on both sides knew that the Soviet-American relationship would dissolve into renewed hostility at the end of the war. To some extent this hostility was based on the incompatibility between the capitalist economic system embraced by the U.S. and the communist ideology of the Soviets. These systems are based on incompatible philosophies, but neither nation operated under a pure version of the system they claimed to support.

Stalin considered the newly conquered territory part of a Soviet sphere of influence. With Germany’s defeat imminent, the Allies created an occupation regime that would initially divide Germany into American, British, French, and Soviet zones.

n the decades after the American Civil War, the frontier was conquered to the point the Census could declare it “closed” in 1890. At that point the U.S. began to pursue American interests around the world.

hese service industries profited from the mining boom: as failed prospectors found, the rush itself often generated more wealth than the mines. The $25.5 million in gold that left Colorado in the first seven years after the Pikes Peak gold strike, for example, was less than half of what speculators had invested in the fever.

At the end of 1921, the new president, Warren G. Harding, commuted Debs’ sentence to time served. We will return to resistance to World War I in a later chapter.

The Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901, carried on the American third-party political tradition. Socialist mayors were elected in thirty-three cities and towns, from Berkeley, California, to Schenectady, New York, and two socialists from Wisconsin and New York won congressional seats.

, despairing farmers faced low crop prices and found few politicians on their side.