by Jingwei Ma

Iran Hostage Crisis

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:01:50 UTC

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However, the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s past and an end to American interference in its affairs. It was also a way to raise the intra- and international profile of the revolution’s leader, the anti-American cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI

2015-03-25 14:11:38 UTC

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The intent of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specifically the Soviet Union.The Strategic Defense Initiative was eventually abandoned, and after a few years, it was nothing other than a short chapter in history books. With bold intentions, the Star Wars program was hopeful of a revolutionary defense system, a system which was said to be nearly impenetrable. Yet with political pressure, both domestic and international, combined with budgetary conflicts, the Strategic Defense Initiative was slated for failure from the start.

Ronald Reagan, New Right, the Moral Majority, and Equal Rights Amendment dies

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:16:24 UTC

The Moral Majority was a prominent American political organization associated with the Christian right. It was founded in 1979 and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role in the mobilization of Christians as a political force and in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s.

The “New Right” refers both to a movement and a group of like-minded conservative activists who came together in the 1970s and built an effective political force for the Republican Party out of existing networks.

Reagan was unabashed in his expressions of support for causes of the New Christian Right, though some noted that Reagan himself was not a regular churchgoer. But he stated his belief that all of the answers to America’s problems could be found in the Bible. In his 1981 inaugural address he called for each inaugural day to be declared “a day of prayer.” He frequently stated his opposition to abortion. In 1983 in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals he described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” casting the Cold War in starkly moral terms. He opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which called for equal protection under the laws for women. The ERA died in 1982, despite polls showing that U.S. public supported it by a 2-to-1 margin. As a result, Reagan won reelection in 1984 by a landslide.

Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika

2015-03-25 14:21:28 UTC

Mikhail Gorbachev is a former aoviet statesman. He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 when the party was dissolved.Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, removed the constitutional role of the Communist Party in governing the state, and inadvertently led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Glasnost was a policy that called for increased openness and transparency in government institutions and activities in the Soviet Union. Introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s. Perestroika was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s (1986), widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "openness") policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

Perestroika is often argued to be the cause of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold war

supply-side economics and Reaganomics

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:29:37 UTC

During the campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan announced a recipe to fix the nation's economic mess. He claimed an undue tax burden, excessive government regulation, and massive social spending programs hampered growth. Reagan proposed a phased 30% tax cut for the first three years of his Presidency. The bulk of the cut would be concentrated at the upper income levels. The economic theory behind the wisdom of such a plan was called supply-side or trickle-down economics.

US support for Israel and Marines in Lebanon

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:34:08 UTC

The first turning point was Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which triggered a series of events that played out over the rest of the Reagan presidency. Israel invaded to push Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerillas away from its borders. The Israelis were initially embraced as liberators by the predominately Shiite population in southern Lebanon, where the Palestinians had alienated the local population. But the welcome was short-lived. The heavy-handed Israelis were soon regarded as occupiers.

To help end hostilities, U.S. mediation produced a deal for the withdrawal of Palestinian guerrillas in exchange for an end to the Israeli siege of Beirut. A multinational force of U.S., French and Italian troops was dispatched to oversee the PLO pullout. The Western coalition was forced to deploy in Beirut a second time for an open-ended stint due to violence among the Lebanese. For the next 18 months, Iran and the United States both had troops in tiny Lebanon.

Sandra Day O’Connor & Phyllis Schlafly

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:35:07 UTC

Sandra Day O’Connor (1930-) was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006, and was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. A moderate conservative, she was known for her dispassionate and meticulously researched opinions. For 24 years, Sandra Day O’Connor was a pioneering force on the Supreme Court and will always be remembered as acting as a sturdy guiding hand in the court’s decisions during those years—and serving a swing vote in many important cases. In 2009 her accomplishments were acknowledged by President Obama who honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly led the battle to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Her movement, called “STOP,” stood for “Stop Taking our Privileges.” Schlafly argued that the ERA would take away key privileges for women, such as the exemption from Selective Service registration and the “dependent wife” clause in Social Security benefits.

Iran-Contra affair

2015-03-25 14:35:48 UTC

was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.^[3] They hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of several US hostages and use the money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

2015-03-25 14:35:52 UTC

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

2015-03-25 14:38:29 UTC

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is a 1987 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. Signed in Washington, D.C. by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on 8 December 1987, it was ratified by the United States Senateon 27 May 1988 and came into force on 1 June of that year. The treaty is formally titled The Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles.

The Contract with America and the Moral Majority

jingweima_1998 — 2015-03-25 14:40:27 UTC

Space technology and exploration improving the quality of life

2015-03-25 14:49:02 UTC

During the 1980s, Kennedy Space Center made a critical shift in focus. Instead of moving relatively quickly from one human spaceflight program to another, as in the fast-paced 1960s and 1970s, the spaceport's workforce and facilities now were geared toward preparing and launching a revolutionary new spacecraft that would further advance our capabilities in orbit: the space shuttle.
President Ronald Reagan set the stage for the future of U.S. human spaceflight in his State of the Union address on Jan. 25, 1984, when he challenged NASA to develop an international, permanently crewed space station.
"A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space," Reagan stated. "We want our friends to help us meet these challenges and share in their benefits. NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals."
The experiences and triumphs achieved at Kennedy during the 1980s helped put the agency on course to make Reagan's vision a reality in the decades to come.

The Rust Belt to the Sun Belt migration within the U.S. and 1986 immigration reform/amnesty

2015-03-25 15:19:44 UTC

1.The Rust Belt is a term for the region straddling the upper Northeastern, the Great Lakes, and the Midwest States, referring to economic decline, population loss and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once powerful industrial sector. The Sun Belt is a region of the United States generally considered to stretch across the Southeast and Southwest (the geographic southern United States).

As manufacturing declined in the Northeast and Midwest during the 1970s, it grew in the states of the South and West.Lured by cheaper - and nonunion - labor, less expensive land, temperate weather, tax breaks, and other government incentives, manufacturers were increasingly choosing the Sun Belt states for their new production facilities.

2.As the nation's attention turns back to the fractured debate over immigration, it might be helpful to remember that in 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law. It was sold as a crackdown: There would be tighter security at the Mexican border, and employers would face strict penalties for hiring undocumented workers.