Young women of the 1920s who dressed and behaved as such were collectively known as Flappers.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks protested the practice of African Americans being required to sit in the back portion of public buses. Led by a young Martin Luther King, Jr. in his first high profile civil rights campaign, the African American community of Montgomery refused to ride public transportation in the city. In 1956, a Supreme Court ruling ended the Alabama and Montgomery laws enabling segregation in buses.

That quote is an excerpt from the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case. The case established that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in practice, because it was inherently unequal. The case reversed a previous decision made by the Supreme Court, in 1896, in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which had mandated that “separate but equal” was constitutional. It was a landmark case in the growing civil rights movement of the era.

The TVA, or Tennessee Valley Authority, changed the face of the Appalachian region. First, it literally changed the landscape, as it constructed different dams necessary to build reservoirs for hydroelectric power that completely obliterated various landmarks, homes, and ancestral graveyards when they impounded water and flooded regions. This is the negative effect of the TVA. In addition, the TVA figuratively changed the landscape by bringing power to a region that many social scientists have compared to a third world country. This is the positive effect of the TVA.

The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village that was raided by police on June 28, 1969. While such raids, which were aiming to arrest bar patrons on decency charges, were common in the period, this raid made many people turn on the police and begin to riot. The event is largely seen as one of the key sparks in the gay rights movement, as it was the first time that gay people had stood up against authorities who persecuted them for simply for being homosexuals.

The Civil Rights Movement, which began in the mid-1950s with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, pursued a variety of methods, including political lobbying, legal arguments, and direct protests. Most notably, the Civil Rights Movement was a non-violent protest movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on principles established by Mohandas Ghandi in India. The Civil Rights activists, usually multiracial and well trained, eschewed violence in all of their protests.

Beginning in the 1880s, America experienced a massive surge of immigration that swelled its population. Overwhelmingly, these immigrants were peasants and laborers from Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians, Bavarians, Poles, Russians, and Jews from all over Eastern Europe came to America from turmoil and conflict in their native countries. Beginning in the early twentieth century, new immigration laws restricted the entrance of immigrants, which were not changed until mid-century.

The Gideon v. Wainwright case was presented to the Supreme Court during the extremely liberal era of Chief Justice Warren. It established that any citizen accused of a crime has the right to legal assistance, even in the event that the citizen is unable to afford the costs. Engel v. Vitale prohibited prayer in public schools. Miranda v. Arizona mandated that law enforcement officials had to inform suspects of their rights prior to questioning. Loving v. Virginia declared laws preventing interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Racial discrimination in property sale and rental was ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

The Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, to head to New Orleans on Greyhound and Trailways buses. The Freedom Riders were made up of both black and white activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Director James Farmer, seeking to integrate interstate bus lines throughout the South. The Supreme Court had ruled, in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), that racial segregation was illegal on interstate bus lines, but the order was widely ignored throughout the South. In Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, both the Ku Klux Klan and police forces attacked the bus, while many Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to prison in Mississippi. The Kennedy Administration notably refused to involve itself either on behalf of the Freedom Riders or the local police. The action of the Freedom Riders brought national attention to segregation policies and the brutality of Southern police forces, initiating widespread change in service throughout the South.

A speakeasy is an establishment illegally set up to supply alcohol. Speakeasies were particularly influential in American society during the prohibition years, where they served as the only place in America one could go to drink.