"Two Minute Warning," confrontation between Selma police and marchers 03/07/1965. Photo: U.S. Department of State.

Cold War

USA spillede en kæmpe rolle i den globale verden i årene efter 2. verdenskrig, især igennem landets indflydelse på de nyoprettede verdensorganisationer: FN (De Forenede Nationer) og NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Det største politiske og diplomatiske problem i den tidlige efterkrigstid blev den kolde krig, som var resultatet af langvarige uenigheder mellem USA og Sovietunionen, om hvilken styringsform og økonomisk system der producerede mest frihed, lighed og velstand.

På siderne herunder kan du læse om den kolde krigs vigtigste grundlag samt begyndelse.



During the closing months of World War II, Soviet military forces occupied all of Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow used its military power to support the efforts of the Communist parties in Eastern Europe and suppress the democratic parties. Communists took over one nation after another. The process concluded with a shocking coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948.




Disagreements between the Soviet Union and the United States developed after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Communist Party under V.I. Lenin considered itself the leader of an international movement that would replace the existing political orders in the West and throughout the world. In 1918 American troops participated in the Allied intervention in Russia on behalf of anti-Bolshevik forces. American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union did not come until 1933 and even then, suspicions persisted. During World War II, however, the two countries found themselves allied and downplayed their differences to counter the Nazi threat.

After WWII, antagonisms between the U.S. and the Soviet Union resurfaced. From the American perspective, the political disengagement and economic protectionism in the U.S. after WWI contributed to the rise of dictatorships in Europe and elsewhere. The United States attempted to correct these perceived mistakes by promoting the concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy following World War II. America now advocated open trade for two reasons: to create markets for American agricultural and industrial products, and to ensure the ability of Western European nations to export as a means of rebuilding their economies. Reduced trade barriers, American policy makers believed, would promote economic growth at home and abroad, bolstering U.S. friends and allies in the process.


  • What does NATO stand for? What purpose does it serve?
  • What did the US and Russia disagree over?
  • Who is Lenin and what did he lead?
  • What concepts did the US try to promote around the world?
  • What concepts did Russia try to promote?

Civil Rights

Selvom meget ændrede sig for USAs minoriteter efter borgerkrigen i 1860’erne, stod det ret skidt til med borgerrettigheder i USA. Borgerretsbevægelsen, ført an af folk som Malcolm X og Martin Luther King, ændrede dette, men ikke uden ofre.

Mange minoriteter i USA har kæmpet for bedre rettigheder, herunder afroamerikanere, kvinder, indianere og – i den seneste tid – homoseksuelle. I afsnittene herunder kan I læse om de mange historiske sejre for alle borgeres lige rettigheder og om de debatter, der stadig finder sted.

African American equality became an increasingly prominent issue in the postwar years. During the war, African Americans had challenged discrimination in the military services and in the work force and made limited gains. Millions of African Americans had left Southern farms for Northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They found instead crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, African American servicemen returned home, many intent on rejecting second-class citizenship.

Jackie Robinson dramatized the racial question in 1947 when he broke baseball’s color line and began playing in the major leagues. A member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he often faced trouble with opponents and teammates as well. But an outstanding first season led to his acceptance and eased the way for other African American players, who now left the Negro leagues to which they had been confined.

Government officials, and many other Americans, discovered the connection between racial problems and Cold War politics. As the leader of the free world, the United States sought support in Africa and Asia. Discrimination at home obstructed the effort to win friends in other parts of the world.

Harry Truman supported the early civil rights movement. He personally believed in political equality, though not in social equality, and recognized the growing importance of the African American urban vote. When informed in 1946 of a series of lynchings and anti-black violence in the South, he appointed a committee on civil rights to investigate discrimination. Its report, To Secure These Rights, issued the next year, documented African Americans’ second-class status in American life and recommended numerous federal measures to secure the rights guaranteed to all citizens.



The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in efforts to overturn the judicial doctrine, established in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that segregation of African American and Caucasian students was constitutional if facilities were “separate but equal.” That decree had been used for decades to sanction rigid segregation in all aspects of Southern life, where facilities were seldom, if ever, equal.



Governor Faubus responded by ordering the Little Rock high schools closed down for the 1958-59 school year. However, a federal court ordered them reopened the following year. They did so in a tense atmosphere with a tiny number of African American students. Thus, school desegregation proceeded at a slow and uncertain pace throughout much of the South.

Another milestone in the civil rights movement occurred in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American seamstress who was also secretary of the state chapter of the NAACP, sat down in the front of a bus in a section reserved by law and custom for whites-only. Ordered to move to the back, she refused. Police came and arrested her for violating the segregation statutes. African American leaders, who had been waiting for just such a case, organized a boycott of the bus system.




The 1960’s was an exciting and tumultuous time in the United States. A generation of youngsters rebelled against the status quo of government, lifestyle, gender roles, discrimination, and many others cultural norms. The 1960s was a time for musical, sexual, and chemical experimentation for many, culminating at Woodstock in 1969. In this era, protests and anti-war sentiment increased. Minorities and many college-aged activists took a stand against discrimination. The 1960s was a time of self-expression and change in America for some, for others, it was seen as an indecent, amoral uprising.

















Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, mobilized in organizations like the radical Asociación Nacional Mexico-Americana, yet did not become confrontational until the 1960s. Hoping that Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program would expand opportunities for them, they found that bureaucrats failed to respond to less vocal groups. The example of African American activism in particular taught Hispanics the importance of pressure politics in a pluralistic society.



In the 1950s, American Indians struggled with the government’s policy of moving them off reservations and into cities where they might assimilate into mainstream America. Many of the uprooted people often had difficulties adjusting to urban life. In 1961, when the policy was discontinued, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted that, for American Indians, “poverty and deprivation are common.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, watching both the development of Third World nationalism and the progress of the civil rights movement, American Indians became more aggressive in pressing for their own rights. A new generation of leaders went to court to protect what was left of tribal lands or to recover those which had been taken, often illegally, in previous times. In state after state, they challenged treaty violations, and in 1967 won the first of many victories guaranteeing long-abused land and water rights. The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, helped channel government funds to American Indian controlled organizations and assisted neglected American Indians in the cities.

Confrontations became more common. In 1969 a landing party of 78 American Indians seized Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and held it until federal officials removed them in 1971. In 1973 AIM took over the South Dakota village of Wounded Knee, where soldiers in the late 19th century had massacred a Sioux encampment. Militants hoped to dramatize the poverty and alcoholism in the reservation surrounding the town. The episode ended after one American Indian was killed and another wounded, with a government agreement to re-examine treaty rights.

Still, American Indian activism brought results. Other Americans became more aware of American Indian needs. Government officials responded with measures including the Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the 1996 Native-American Housing and Self-Determination Act. The Senate’s first American Indian member, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, was elected in 1992.

While some aspects of gay rights remain controversial in the United States, trends favor tolerance and understanding.

Gallup Polls of public opinion have been measuring American attitudes toward gays for many years. In a recent poll, 69 percent of Americans favored allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve in the military, versus 43 percent in favor in 1993. A CNN poll puts support at more than 80 percent.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was asked his views on gay marriage at a June 1 event at the National Press Club in Washington. “I think that freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney said. “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish.” He added, however, that he does not support federal legislation on gay marriage. “It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis.”

Five states are or will soon be issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples: Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont. Several other states offer some form of domestic partnership or civil union to same-sex couples.

President Obama has said he supports full civil unions and federal rights for LGBT couples and opposes a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

As of 2007, the overwhelming majority of Americans (89 percent) believe homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities. Three-fifths of Americans today believe homosexual relationships should be legal, as opposed to only one-third in the mid-1980s. Almost as many view homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.

The United States is joining 66 other United Nations member states in condemning the persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.“The United States is an outspoken defender of human rights and critic of human rights abuses around the world,” Robert Wood, State Department acting spokesman, said in a statement released March 18. “[W]e will continue to remind countries of the importance of respecting the human rights of all people in all appropriate international fora.”

The U.N. Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity calls on all member states and relevant international human rights mechanisms “to commit to promote and protect human rights of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The statement further urges all states to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity “may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention.”

Read more?

If you want to read more about the current debate concerning gay rights in the US her are a few links: