Chapter 30 Reading Guide: Society, Politics, and World Events from Ford to Reagan, 1974-1989
See the Concept Outline handout for all of Period 8 (1945-1980) Know all of these Key Terms and their
Significance – these all should be in your outlines and highlighted, Try to add these where they belong in the
Concept Outline
Note that Chapter 30 in our book goes beyond College Board’s Period 8 (1980 vs 1989)
Gerald Ford
Pardon of Nixon
Energy crisis
OPEC
Yom Kippur War
Wage and price controls
Stagflation
Rachel Carson Silent Spring
Three Mile Island
Earth Day
Endangered Species Act
Ralph Nader Unsafe at Any Speed
Affirmative action
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Equal Rights Amendment
Glass ceiling
Roe v Wade (1973)
Phyllis Schlafly
Bakke v. University of CA (1978)
Indian Self-Determination Act (1974)
Moral Majority
Jimmy Carter
Depts. of Energy and Education
Panama Canal Treaty
SALT II
Camp David Accords
Iranian hostage crisis
New Right
Reagonomics
Supply Side Economics
Strategic Defense Initiative
Iran-contra scandal
Sandra Day O’Connor
Mikhail Gorbachev
Fall of the Berlin Wall
After reading the chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.
1. What effect did Nixon’s presidency have on domestic politics?
2. Describe the new patterns of immigration into the United States that set in after 1965.
3. What became of the social movements of the 60’s in the 1970s and 80s? Why?How did
prospects for Native Americans improve in the late 1960s and 1970s? What significant problems
continued to plague American Indians?
4. What are some of the causes of the “malaise” of the late 1970s?
5. What were the main events/issues of Jimmy Carter’s presidency? Think domestic and foreign
policy; successes and failures?
6. What are some of the causes, characteristics, characters, and consequences of the rise of the
Religious Right and the conservative revolution?
7. Explain the Iran-contra affair.
8. Discuss briefly the record of the Reagan and Bush administrations on environmental issues.
How do they compare with earlier administrations? What administrations would you choose to
include in a compare and contrast essay about environmental issues?
9. Why did government continue to grow throughout the 1980’s despite the rising influence of
“small government” conservatives?
10. Explain how and why U.S.-Soviet relations changed from the late 1970s to 1988. What factors
led to the end of the Cold War?