In this video lecture we're going to look at the post-World War II period. The Allies won World War II, but the devastation was terrific. Europe was completely disrupted and destroyed, Asia was in ruins and the US and to some extent Canada and Australia emerged from the war as stable industrial giants in the midst of the destruction of the European and Asian industrial structure. So, the US engaged in something called the Marshall Plan which was a major investment in the redevelopment particularly of Germany and Japan, so that the opposition and the war would find their way to the kind of liberal democracy that existed in the US. And so, having done that, and investment in France and in Germany and to a small degree investment in China, all of the Chinese Civil War prevented quite a lot of that. We see an American leadership, and an American domination really that goes on a well into the 1960s. So, but at home, important things are happening in the social policy world, the great migration is continuing from during the war and actually beefed from the 1920s into the 1960s and '70s, the flow from the South and from Puerto Rico continues into America. And in the world of the American apartheid we have significant open housing fights in the North. There are covenants that make it impossible to sell your house to African-Americans, to Jews and into some sense to Catholics, and these are challenged with street demonstrations, with political organization, and with court action, and so there's really major shifts in housing policy along with the continuing building of public housing will enter the 1960s, so that the significant public housing developments that we see in America really are built in this period. Brown versus Board of Education is one, the NAACP fights to end the separate but equal education in the United States and particularly in the South, and the Supreme Court finds in 1954 that you cannot operate a separate and segregated school system. This is not really enforced until 1959, it takes about five years for any enforcement to happen, and then the first enforcement is in Little Rock Arkansas, and this is one of the pieces of the development of the civil rights movement. But a second piece that happens in 1954 is a young man I think he was 14 Emmett Till was taken by the Ku Klux Klan, and brutally murdered and lynched, and the country particularly the African-Americans in the country were just agitated and animated by this brutality. The fight against lynching had been going on for almost a 100 years at this point, but this particular lynching really led people to say no more. The country was booming, the period after the war is a period of great growth in productivity, the building of the American suburbs, the building of the modern universities all around the country and so, in the cities in suburbs incomes were expanding. But the people that were left in rural areas of the country were really suffering, in the share croppers in the South, the mountain people in Appalachia, that Chicanos in the Southwest there is a great deal of poverty there, and this is rediscovered and there was a lot of concern about how do we make the country more equal. And its social welfare peace there's really a lot of building of the Social Security System that was passed in the New Deal and some changes happened in this period. AFDC was replaced ADC the program that was originally Aid to Dependent Children, became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and the notion that it took a family to support this. Disability insurance was added, so if you became disabled you could call upon your Social Security income, and more and more workers were covered. Initially, the Social Security Act covered mostly factory workers, but the system was expanded to include people who are working in services, and people who are working in government. And then in the midst of all of this, we create the mother and child support system, which is a system that understands that parents that don't live with their children have economic and financial responsibility for their children, and we begin to build out an enforcement system to put that in place. So, these are pieces of what's happening in the 1950s, we're going to hear more when we get into some more specific topics.