Blake Runfola

US History

A Biography of America: The Fifties/From War to Normalcy

1. Who was the journalist killed in Okinawa?

Ernie Pyle
2. What was the bloodiest island fight of the Pacific War?
The invasion of Okinawa
3. How many Allied troops were killed by the kamikaze attacks during this battle?
5,000
4. What did the Allies use against the Japanese in caves and underground shelters?
They used flamethrowers with napalm
5. “The way of the warrior” (Bushido code) was ________________________.
Total resistance, defiance to the last man, no surrender, no prisoners.
6. How did racism inflame the fighting in the Pacific?
Japanese saw Americans as devils mixed with all the different races and Americans
saw the Japanese as barbarians because of their tactics of torture and suicide
bombing.
7. What was the impact of the fire bombing carried out by the Allies against Japan?
Many women and children were killed, turned the Americans doing it into hardened
men and most felt like wild animals. LeMay used gel bombs to wipe out condensed
parts of Japan.
8. What is the danger of nuclear weapons according to scientist Philip Morrison?
The cheapness of them, “one bomb, one city”
9. Who helped solve the postwar housing shortage?
Bill Levitt
10. Why was Eisenhower the “perfect American president” for the 1950s?
He was a general in the war and a war hero commander and that time was when
people didn’t want to tamper with too much of the ideas of reform.
11. What, according to Miller, is the threat that brings Americans together in the 1950s?
(promoting the orthodoxy, homogeneity, tribalism…)
Communism in Russia, Godless-Communism.
12. Who found the cohesiveness of the culture “stifling” in the 1950s?
Teenagers, young people
13. What technology widened the rift between teenagers and their parents in the 1950s?
Transistor Radio.
14. Who was the “revolutionary” who made the music of the underclass the music of the
world?
Elvis Presley
15. What civil rights case was won in 1954?
Brown v. Board of Education
16. Who argued the case before the Supreme Court? (later became the first African American
justice on the Court)

17. Where does one need to look for the roots of the rebellion of the ‘60s?

18. Identify the author of each of the following:

a. On the Road ______________________________

b. The Affluent Society ________________________
c. Silent Spring ______________________________
d. (Who remembers Lewis Mumford?)
e. The Feminine Mystique _____________________
19. Who made a name for himself exposing the Corvair as a dangerous car?

20. Who was the man in the gray flannel suit?