The ten most significant developments for the United States from 1945 to the present - Essay Example

On August 14, 1945, President Harry Truman announced that the war had ended. It was V-J day1. Truman, in addressing the crowds said "We face the greatest taskand it's going to take the help of all of you to do it." Celebrations across the country took place and people celebrated the sheer joy of knowing there was no more war. What they did not realize was that there were new tensions to be dealt with in our own country. We as a nation sat and wondered about the impact of atomic bombs in our world.

Indeed President Truman, in his diary pondered "I hope for some form of peacebut I fear machines are ahead of mortals".While riding in an automobile procession in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, he was shot to death by an assassin firing from an upper floor of a building. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed two days later in the Dallas city jail by Jack Ruby, owner of a strip-tease club. At 46 years of age, Kennedy became the fourth president to be assassinated and the eighth to die in office.

On the early morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, an office-hotel-apartment complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were burglary tools, cameras and film, and three pen-size tear gas guns. At the scene of the crime, and in rooms the men rented at the Watergate, sophisticated electronic bugging equipment was found. President Nixon attempted to use his presidential powers to quash the investigation into the incident.

He attempted to avoid subpoenas ordering him to turn over tapes of the incident. The Supreme Court ordered that it was illegal for the President to use his presidential powers to thwart an investigation 5. Mid 1980's - America Becomes Aware of AIDS3 "The dominant feature of this first period was silence, for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by signs or symptoms salient enough to be noticed. While rare, sporadic case reports of AIDS and sero-archaeological studies have documented human infections with HIV prior to 1970, available data suggest that the current pandemic started in the mid- to late 1970s.

By 1980, HIV had spread to at least five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia). During this period of silence, spread was unchecked by awareness or any preventive action and approximately 100,000-300,000 persons may have been infected." 6. Black Monday- the Stock Market Crash of 1987 The stock market crash of 1987 was the largest one day stock market crash in history. The Dow lost 22.6% of its value or $500 billion dollars on October 19th 1987. 7. 1992 - Riots in Los Angeles due to the Rodney King beating.

Rodney King became a reluctant symbol of police brutality a decade ago when amateur photographer George Holliday provided evidence that was hard to ignore. The videotape Holliday shot showed several white Los Angeles police officers using their batons to beat King, who had led them on a car chase after they tried to stop him for speeding, was broadcast around the world. 8. Y2K - 1999 Y2K bug was a clicking time bomb for all major computer applications. The computer and system application companies came out with year 2000 compliant operating systems and system software.

IT companies around the world spent billions of dollars to go through their entire application source code to look