The American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis in 1968.
Correct Answer
True
True. Urban Native activists founded AIM to fight poverty, police abuse and discrimination, and it went on to lead protests such as the Trail of Broken Treaties march and the occupation of Wounded Knee.
Category: Identity Movements
Question 2
Phyllis Schlafly led the national campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
Correct Answer
False
False. Phyllis Schlafly was the leading opponent of the amendment; her STOP ERA campaign argued it would undermine protections for women as wives and mothers and mobilized conservative women against ratification.
Category: Identity Movements
Question 3
In Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion, a ruling the Court overturned in 2022.
Correct Answer
True
True. Roe v. Wade was a major victory for the women's movement and became a lasting source of political conflict. The Court overturned it in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, returning the issue to the states.
Category: Identity Movements
Question 4
During the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association added homosexuality to its official list of mental illnesses.
Correct Answer
False
False. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in the 1970s, a change gay rights activists had pressed for.
Category: Identity Movements
Question 5
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, shortly after winning the California Democratic primary.
Correct Answer
True
True. Kennedy had entered the race as an antiwar candidate after Johnson's weak showing in New Hampshire. His death, two months after Martin Luther King Jr.'s, deepened the turmoil of 1968.
Category: Nixon's Politics
Question 6
The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago passed peacefully, with no clashes between police and protesters.
Correct Answer
False
False. Chicago police clashed violently with antiwar protesters outside the convention, and the televised scenes made the Democrats look divided as Hubert Humphrey won the nomination.
Category: Nixon's Politics
Question 7
In 1971, Nixon stopped allowing foreign governments to exchange U.S. dollars for gold.
Correct Answer
True
True. Facing inflation and a weakening dollar, Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility to gold for foreign governments, a step that led to the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and he imposed temporary wage and price controls.
Category: Nixon's Politics
Question 8
Nixon's New Federalism shifted power to Washington by eliminating federal block grants to the states.
Correct Answer
False
False. New Federalism expanded block grants, which gave state and local governments more control over how federal money was spent.
Category: Nixon's Politics
Question 9
The Nixon Doctrine asked American allies to take more responsibility for their own defense.
Correct Answer
True
True. Nixon said the United States would keep its treaty commitments and provide aid, but allies would have to supply most of the troops for their own defense.
Category: Nixon Foreign Policy
Question 10
Lieutenant William Calley was acquitted of all charges in the killing of civilians at My Lai.
Correct Answer
False
False. Calley was convicted in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison; his sentence was later reduced and he was paroled in 1974. He was the only soldier convicted for the massacre.
Category: Vietnam's End
Question 11
At Jackson State College in Mississippi in May 1970, police fired on student protesters and killed two people.
Correct Answer
True
True. The shooting at the historically Black college came eleven days after Kent State but received far less national attention.
Category: Vietnam's End
Question 12
The peace agreement signed in Paris in January 1973 required all North Vietnamese troops to leave South Vietnam.
Correct Answer
False
False. The agreement required American forces to withdraw within 60 days, but more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops were allowed to remain in the South.
Category: Vietnam's End
Question 13
North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon in 1975, about two years after the Paris peace agreement was signed.
Correct Answer
True
True. The Paris agreement of January 1973 let the United States pull out its remaining troops, but fighting between North and South resumed. Americans and some South Vietnamese allies were evacuated by helicopter on April 29 and 30, 1975, and South Vietnam surrendered on April 30.
Category: Vietnam's End
Question 14
Richard Nixon lost the 1972 presidential election to George McGovern.
Correct Answer
False
False. Nixon won reelection in a landslide, with 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17. The Watergate cover-up unraveled only after the election.
Category: Watergate
Question 15
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied partly on an anonymous source called Deep Throat, later identified as FBI official Mark Felt.
Correct Answer
True
True. Woodward and Bernstein kept the Watergate story alive by tracing the money and connections that linked the burglars to the White House and Nixon's campaign.
Category: Watergate
Question 16
Gerald Ford became vice president by winning election on Nixon's ticket in 1972.
Correct Answer
False
False. Ford was appointed vice president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned. When Nixon resigned, Ford became president without having been elected to either office.
Category: Ford and Carter
Question 17
In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, the United States, the Soviet Union and other nations accepted Europe's postwar borders and pledged to respect human rights.
Correct Answer
True
True. Ford signed the accords as part of detente. Critics said they accepted Soviet control of Eastern Europe, while others saw them as a realistic acceptance of the postwar order.
Category: Ford and Carter
Question 18
Jimmy Carter signed treaties that gave Colombia control of the Panama Canal.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Panama Canal treaties of 1977 provided for returning the canal to Panama, which took full control at the end of 1999.
Category: Ford and Carter
Question 19
After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter led a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
Correct Answer
True
True. The boycott was one of several steps Carter took against the invasion, along with a grain embargo and the Carter Doctrine warning against threats to the Persian Gulf.
Category: Ford and Carter
Question 20
The American hostages held in Iran were freed in 1980, a few weeks before the presidential election.
Correct Answer
False
False. The 52 hostages were held for 444 days and released on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office. The long crisis badly damaged Carter's presidency.
Category: Ford and Carter