How were Americans influenced by the end of the Cold War

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called "containment." In 1946, in his famous "Long Telegram," the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained this policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U. S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]"; as a result, America's only choice was the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." President Harry Truman (1884-1972) agreed. "It must be the policy of the United States," he declared before Congress in 1947, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation ... by outside pressures." This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

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The United States entered the final decade of the twentieth century triumphant. American vigilance in the cold war had contributed to the shocking collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of democratic capitalism in eastern Europe. The United States was now the world's only superpower. By the mid-nineties, the American economy would become the marvel of the world as remarkable gains in productivity afforded by new technologies created the greatest period of prosperity in modern history.

From 1980 to 2010, the population of the United States grew by 25 percent to 306 million. The number of traditional family units continued to decline; the poverty rate was especially high among African Americans. A wave of immigrants caused Latinos to surpass African Americans as the nation's largest minority.