Social Studies

In the 1960s President Lyndon Baines Johnson continued fueling the domestic agenda of his "Great Society," keeping a low profile on the Vietnam War. But the U.S. overspent and inflation bubbled over.

In 1954 relying on "automatic stabilizers," President Dwight Eisenhower withheld raising taxes in order to encourage consumer spending. In the 1960s, newly elected John F. Kennedy and economic advisor Walter Heller pushed Congress to approve a $12 billion tax cut stimulus.

The Federal Reserve was originally created in 1913 as an emergency lender to banks--a sort of bank of last resort. The Banking Act of 1935 and the Fed Accord of 1951 broadened the powers of the Fed, widening the range of options and tools it could use to manage the economy.

In 1977, the federal court system told the Reserve Mining Company to build a $400 million disposal site for carcinogenic materials. After 1970, Los Angeles was looking for a broad-ranging smog-reduction policy to reflect recently amended Clean Air Act standards.

In 1937 the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government-owned utility company, was created to electrify rural communities and control flooding. 1965 marked the first U.S. attempt at national health insurance in the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. In response to 9/11, the U.S.

In response to rising interest rates in the 1970s, the Maryland legislature raised usury ceilings so that more home loans would be available. In December of 1980 Apple Computers went public, affirming four years of hard work with substantial compensation for its founders.

Farmers lured into producing massive food surpluses for WWI could no longer profit when the war ended and demand plummeted. After 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to improve the conditions of farmers via policies in his New Deal plan.

Competition with General Motors eventually rendered Ford's single-option Model-T obsolete. In 1959, a reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel discovered a price-fixing scandal between three big-name electric companies in each of their closed bids to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act broke up the monopoly that John D. Rockefeller and his company, Standard Oil, had on the oil industry.

The International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) strike in the early 1900s was inspired by poor working conditions and low wages.

By 1916 Henry Ford's assembly line had lowered the price of the Model T to $360, making it affordable and increasing its production exponentially in two years.

In preparation for WWII, the Roosevelt administration instituted wage price and price controls to curb inflation and better focus production on war materials.

The nation's cycles of economic booms and busts were considered intrinsically capitalistic by Joseph Schumpeter who called them "methodic economic growth," and by Karl Marx who lambasted capitalism as inherently flawed.

The Knickerbocker Bank's failure led to the Bank Panic of 1907, and ultimately inspired a need for a central bank.

The return of U.S. troops from overseas following World War II created a massive demand for cheap housing. Rising labor and energy costs in the United States in the '60s and '70s forced domestic steel manufacturer NUCOR to find ways to lower production costs.