Rise to World Power (1898–1991)
Starting with the Spanish-American War (1898), the USA began its rise to global power. The First World War (entry in 1917) made the USA the creditor of Europe. The Roaring Twenties brought jazz, Hollywood, skyscrapers, and the boom — followed by the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, which plunged 25% of Americans into unemployment.
The Second World War — triggered for the USA by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) — transformed the country into the greatest military power in history. D-Day (June 6, 1944), Iwo Jima, and finally the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945) ended the war and defined the new world order.
The Cold War (1947–1991) between the USA and the Soviet Union shaped half a century: McCarthyism, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis (1962, the world on the brink of nuclear war), Vietnam War (1964–1975, 58,000 American dead, deep societal division), arms race, moon landing (1969), and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of the Soviet Union (1991).
In parallel: The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s — Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. ("I Have a Dream", 1963), the Freedom Riders, the Selma marches — fought for the abolition of segregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King's assassination in 1968 (like that of JFK in 1963 and Robert Kennedy in 1968) deeply traumatized the nation.
