and killed his family. Once the Americans had liberated
Austria, he began the long and harrowing journey home
to Czechoslovakia, passing through lands that were now
controlled not by the Germans but by the Soviets. In those
closing days of World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War
were already apparent.
The war made the United States the most powerfulnation on earth. Its territory was unscathed, and wartime
mobilization more than doubled the nation’s economic
capacity. That power—combined with a sense of
international stewardship—launched a new era of foreign
policy that was accelerated by the swift deterioration of
relations with the Soviet Union. The world of free trade
outlined by the Atlantic Charter—a logical extension of
American capitalism—was treated as a direct threat by the
Soviet Union. While the United States helped to rebuild
western Europe after the war through the Marshall Plan,
it also began to expand its military presence in Europe and
around the world. The Soviets similarly asserted their sphere
of influence, raising the stakes in a cold war where each
considered the other the aggressor (pages 222 and 224).
World War II and the Cold War profoundly shapeddomestic life as well. Wartime spending quickly ended the
Great Depression, and postwar federal priorities both altered
the nation’s economic structure and fueled widespread
prosperity. In 1944 the Army Map Service printed an
astonishing series of maps tracing the evolution of the lower
Mississippi River over centuries. The research undergirding
these maps was designed to control flooding on the river,
and reflected a heightened commitment to domestic
infrastructure (page 218). Similarly, the Serviceman’s
Readjustment Act—known as the G.I. Bill—created a
generation of homeowners and college students, while the
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 integrated the country
and advanced suburban development (page 228). These
large-scale federal investments—as well as ongoing defense
spending—accelerated the westward migration of the
population, and by 1963 California had eclipsed New York
as the nation’s largest state.
While highways facilitated mobility on the ground,
the rise of commercial aviation expanded mobility in the
air (page 220). Here too the war mattered, for thousands
of surplus aircraft stimulated the explosion of postwar air
travel. In the 1950s, the jet engine revolutionized aviation,
shortening travel between the coasts from nine hours to five.
Just as the railroads had transformed geography in the late
nineteenth century, the advent of airline travel transformed
it in the twentieth, integrating different industries and
regions and stimulating economic growth.
Postwar prosperity and technological innovation also
brought new forms of leisure and entertainment, such as
television. Among the early adopters of this new medium
was Walt Disney, who began to broadcast his animated
characters into American living rooms by the early 1950s.
At the same time, he began to envision a large theme park
where these characters would come to life. The preliminary
sketch of Disneyland on page 226 captures his vision for this
modern form of leisure, one that would further enhance the
allure of Southern California.
But this era of abundance was severely limited by racial
discrimination. Among the most egregious examples was the
wartime executive order that evacuated Japanese Americans
to remote internment camps throughout the West. The
armed forces were also segregated by race during the war,
prompting black leaders to decry the hypocrisy of fighting
tyranny abroad while racial injustice remained unchallenged
at home. After the war, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board
of Education decision determined that segregation indeed
violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection
clause. But the limited gains of the Civil Rights Movement
left many activists frustrated by the early 1960s. The modest
newspaper map of the Freedom Rides on page 230 illustrates
the crucial role of the media in exposing Southern resistance
to federal desegregation orders. The fight against Soviet
repression abroad also nudged civil rights forward at mid-
century, demonstrating the deep connection between
foreign and domestic policy in these decades.