WPA Film Library.
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As the United State's first female ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick helped formulate the Reagan Administration's policies toward Africa. In her view, free-market capitalist systems were the best solution to bringing positive economic change within African countries.
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President Ronald Reagan believed that environmental deregulation would allow for American economic expansion and an end to the nation's recession. He appointed Anne Burford to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and she soon entered into a long dispute with Congress after she refused to release subpoenaed documents that dealt with the cleanup of hazardous waste sites.
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After France's liberation at the end of World War II, the French Vichy government in Vietnam disbanded. Subsequently the communist leader Ho Chi Minh established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with the intention of ousting the remaining French colonials. From 1946 to 1954 French military forces fought against the Viet Minh communist rebels until the outbreak of full-scale civil war between North and South Vietnam.
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for reelection in 1956 despite suffering from heart problems. In recognition of the rising popularity of television and its power to establish a candidate's image, Eisenhower used the new medium to show himself in good health and spirits. As a result the public was never fully aware of the extent of his illness.
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The 1900 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty authorized construction of a U.S.-controlled canal through Central America, which would drastically reduce travel time between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. To build the canal, workers used specially-adapted equipment that had originally been designed for the railroad industry. Construction of the Panama Canal began in 1904 and was completed ten years later.
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In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb, thus determining the focus of U.S. nuclear energy research in the 1950s. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower developed the "Atoms for Peace" program, which aimed to develop peaceful uses for atomic power. Under the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the first commercial atomic energy plant opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957.
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Iranian premier Muhammad Mosaddeq announced in May 1951 that Iran planned to nationalize the nation's oil assets. At the time, the majority of Iranian oil was controlled and distributed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation. Though the British government attempted to negotiate with Mosaddeq, he stood firm. Britain then instituted an embargo against Iranian oil, plunging Iran into an economic crisis.
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The post-World War II Red Scare started with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations. Government officials, media personalities, and average citizens were accused of being communist spies. The trials of Jack and Myra Sobel and Jacob Alban were not as well-publicized as were the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted and executed on charges of collusion with the Soviet Union in 1953.
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The world was shocked by the reports sent by the Allies after they liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Conservative British member of Parliament Mavis Tate visited Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen to survey the atrocities firsthand. In a film report that she made for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Tate reproached those people who claimed the Holocaust had been exaggerated, adding that "the reality was indescribably worse".
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During the Church Committee hearings in 1975, counsel members described evidence that indicated that J. Edgar Hoover had directed the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to collect information that could discredit social reformers. Curtis Smothers, a committee investigator, testified that FBI agents attempted to sway public opinion against Martin Luther King Jr.
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Actress Jane Fonda was one of the most vocal protestors of the Vietnam War and worked on three anti-war films in the 1970s. The 1971 New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers - a classified Defense Department study of the faulty decision-making during the war - led to a stronger anti-war sentiment among the public. In 1972, Fonda made a two-week trip to North Vietnam, during which she was photographed sitting atop an enemy weapon and broadcast...
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In 1906 Russian Prime Minister Peter Stolypin initiated land reform policies that gave peasant farmers the chance to own land. Stolypin's policies were meant to form a middle class and therefore decrease the possibility of a peasant class rebellion. The land-owning farmers became known as kulaks, a term that would come to be used often in the following decades of turmoil. Perhaps ironically, Stalin later used the term kulak to refer to any peasant...
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During the 1950s, popular culture expected women to play the part of the honest, caring, and conservative bastion, and the fashion styles of the decade reflected that. Women's bathing suits covered the whole torso and were often skirted. This was in stark contrast to later trends. In the 1960s women's fashion had taken a turn to showing more skin. The playful mod fashion meant shortened hemlines, funkier prints, and skimpier bathing suits and bikinis....