The Republican vice president who lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy after their televised debates was Richard Nixon.
Missing Word
Nixon
Richard Nixon had served eight years as Eisenhower's vice president. Kennedy beat him by a tiny popular margin, and Nixon later won the presidency in 1968.
Category: Kennedy Years
Question 2
The revolutionary leader Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959 and soon aligned his government with the Soviet Union.
Missing Word
Castro
Fidel Castro overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista. His alliance with the Soviet Union led to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis.
Category: Kennedy Years
Question 3
In May 1961, the astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space.
Missing Word
Shepard
Alan Shepard's flight came weeks after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth. It boosted American confidence in the space race that Kennedy made a national priority.
Category: Kennedy Years
Question 4
Two days after Kennedy's assassination, the Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald as police moved him from the city jail.
Missing Word
Ruby
Jack Ruby killed Oswald before he could stand trial, which fed later conspiracy theories. The Warren Commission still concluded that Oswald had acted alone.
Category: Kennedy Years
Question 5
The program created alongside Medicare in 1965 that uses federal and state funds to pay medical costs for low-income Americans is called Medicaid.
Missing Word
Medicaid
Medicaid helps the poor pay for health care, while Medicare covers people aged 65 and older. Both were major parts of Johnson's Great Society.
Category: Great Society
Question 6
Southern senators tried to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a filibuster, a tactic of extended debate meant to prevent a vote.
Missing Word
filibuster
A filibuster lets senators delay a bill by refusing to end debate. Johnson worked with Senate leaders to gather enough votes to break it, and the act passed in 1964.
Category: Great Society
Question 7
General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, assured Americans in late 1967 that the end of the war was in sight.
Missing Word
Westmoreland
William Westmoreland led the American war effort as troop numbers grew past 400,000. The Tet Offensive weeks later made his optimistic claims look badly mistaken.
Category: Vietnam Escalation
Question 8
In 1962, riots broke out when the Air Force veteran James Meredith enrolled as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi.
Missing Word
Meredith
James Meredith's enrollment was enforced by federal marshals, and Kennedy sent troops after a violent riot broke out on campus. The episode showed that the federal government would back court-ordered integration.
Category: Civil Rights Movement
Question 9
In March 1965, state troopers beat voting rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, an attack remembered as Bloody Sunday.
Missing Word
Selma
Selma was the starting point of the march toward Montgomery. Televised images of the beatings built national support for the Voting Rights Act, signed that August.
Category: Civil Rights Movement
Question 10
Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, helped lead the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the all-White state delegation in 1964.
Missing Word
Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer had been evicted for trying to register to vote. Her televised testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention exposed the violence used to keep Black Mississippians from the polls.
Category: Civil Rights Movement
Question 11
In August 1965, days after the Voting Rights Act became law, rioting broke out in Watts, a largely Black neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Missing Word
Watts
The Watts riot left 34 people dead and showed that legal victories had not solved poverty, unemployment and police abuse in northern and western cities.
Category: Civil Rights Movement
Question 12
Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962 to organize California's migrant laborers.
Missing Word
Huerta
Dolores Huerta was a labor organizer and negotiator. The association merged in 1966 with the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, forming the union that became the United Farm Workers.
Category: Black Power and Chicano Activism
Question 13
The activist Reies López Tijerina spent years trying to win back Hispanic land grants in New Mexico that families had lost after the Mexican-American War.
Missing Word
Tijerina
Reies López Tijerina was a leader of the Chicano movement, the Mexican American counterpart to Black Power. His campaign to recover New Mexico land grants reflected the movement's demand that lands taken after the Mexican-American War be returned.
Category: Black Power and Chicano Activism
Question 14
The author Betty Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966 and became its first president.
Missing Word
Friedan
Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and drafted NOW's statement of purpose, which called for women's full participation in American life and later for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Category: Women's Movement
Question 15
The journalist Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, one of the first national publications to address domestic violence and sexual harassment.
Missing Word
Steinem
Gloria Steinem became one of the best-known voices of second-wave feminism. Ms. magazine gave the women's movement a national publication of its own.
Category: Women's Movement