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AP U.S. History — Period 8 (1945–1980) — Drill 29

Drill 29 · Multiple Choice · Period 8: 1945–1980

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About This Drill

AP U.S. History — Period 8 (1945–1980) — Drill 29 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Period 8: 1945–1980. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

This AP U.S. History Period 8 drill uses a modern historian's analysis of the 1970s as a decade of crisis and transformation. Questions address the historian's central argument, the collapse of the postwar liberal economic consensus, and why the 1970s are often overlooked in standard historical narratives.

Passage

The following is adapted from a modern historian's essay on the 1970s as a decade of crisis and transformation. The 1970s are the decade that American memory prefers to forget. Bookended by the triumphs of the 1960s civil rights legislation and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, the decade in between appears as a dispiriting interlude of failure: Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, the hostage crisis, malaise. But this narrative of failure obscures the decade's genuine and lasting significance. The 1970s were the years in which the economic assumptions that had sustained the postwar liberal consensus finally collapsed under the weight of global competition, energy shocks, and deindustrialization. They were also the years in which the political coalition that had delivered civil rights legislation shattered — not because its goals were achieved, but because the economic anxieties of the white working class made them available to a new conservative politics that promised restoration rather than transformation.

Questions in This Drill

  1. The historian's argument that the 1970s are 'the decade that American memory prefers to forget' most directly challenges which of the following approaches to understanding this period?
  2. The historian's argument that 'the economic assumptions that had sustained the postwar liberal consensus finally collapsed' most directly refers to which of the following developments of the 1970s?
  3. The historian's claim that the liberal political coalition 'shattered' in the 1970s because 'the economic anxieties of the white working class made them available to a new conservative politics' most directly describes which of the following political phenomena?
  4. The 'energy shocks' the historian references as contributing to the collapse of postwar economic assumptions most directly refers to which of the following events?
  5. Which of the following most directly supports the historian's argument that the 1970s had 'genuine and lasting significance' rather than being merely a transitional decade?