The Biggest Events in the Last 60 Years: Sputnik, JFK Assassination, Vietnam, The Berlin Wall, Impeachment of President Clinton and 9/11

The most important events of the past six decades are disparate ones. They include an assassination, an evacuation, a launch, the tearing down of a wall, a blue dress, and a falling tower. What they all have in common, however, was their ability to reshape American public discourse both when they occurred and in the subsequent decades. While any number of events over the past sixty years has resonated with the public, I believe that the events outlined below are special in that they mark watershed moments in American history when something important changed in the way that Americans viewed the world. This paper will outline these epochal events and conclude with some speculation concerning what the next major epochal event could be.

The most significant political, social, and cultural event of the 1950s was the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik. On October 4, 1957, the communist nation became the first to successfully launch a satellite into orbit. Americans awoke that morning to a new star in their skies, shining menacingly. The launch touched off what is now known as the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union and led directly to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 ("Sputnik"). Sputnik showed the entire world that the Soviet Union was technologically far ahead of United States. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summed up what much of the world and all of America believed when

g the height of U.S.-Soviet tension, the Wall represented the psychological divide between free Western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe. On November 9, 1989, the East German government announced that it would allow its citizens to enter West Berlin ("Berlin"). The images of Berliners meeting at the wall and chipping away parts of it as remembrances marked, for all intents and purposes, the end of the Cold War in the American public's eye. The U.S. had persevered and won the Cold War, and the feeling of relief that swept through the public was surely the most sweeping emotion of the 1980s. After four long decades of nuclear paranoia, the U.S. public awoke in 1989 to a changed world in which the Soviet Union was dissolving and the nuclear threat it represented was suddenly no longer as menacing. The American public felt pride in their victory, a pride that contrasted vividly with the lingering shame from the Vietnam War (Tusa, 1997). America's victory in the Cold War has not turned out to be nearly as neat as it looked on that fateful day in 1989; nevertheless, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the moment when the American public realized that the war was over and that we had won. 1990s: Clinton Impeachment The im

Category: Government - T