Browse Exhibits (23 total)

The 1960s were a time of great cultural, social and political unrest.  Despite its conservative reputation, Washington and Lee University, a small, all-male liberal arts college in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, did not escape the decade's upheavals. From debates over desegregation and black power, to curricular changes, to coeducation, the sexual revolution, and the student movement to stop the War in Vietnam, W&L's faculty, staff and student body participated in and contributed to the 1960s.  

Washington and Lee University is a conservative campus today and was comparatively conservative in 1970 as well according to several members of the university community at the time. However in May of 1970 the University was caught up in the national Student Strike. May of 1970 was an extraordinary time when students at Washington and Lee and at campuses across the country stopped attending class to protest. Hundreds of thousands of students marched on Washington DC. These radical and nationwide events were immediately precipitated by the Nixon administration's decision to invade Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State by members of the National Guard on May 4, 1970 resulting in the deaths of four students. However longer arching sources of discontent and habits of protest had created the atmosphere that allowed this spectacular show of national student discontent. Student protest movements on Civil Rights in the early 1960s, the University of California Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, and growing anti-Vietnam movement throughout the middle and late parts of the decade had prepared students with the tools, the will, and the precedent to express their unrest.

The United States has experimented with a variety of tax systems.  For most of the 19^th century, American finance depended on tariff revenues.  The exception came in the 1860s, when the cost of the Civil War forced the Union to adopt a progressive income tax.  The tariff regime crumbled in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in face of criticisms that the tax on imports helped only the wealthy few.  In 1913, Congress and the states amended the Constitution to allow the federal government to levy a tax on incomes.  The income tax, however, did not become a major revenue source until the Second World War. The digital exhibit explores the politics of the federal income tax between 1860 and 1945 with particular attention to how wars and other crises affected both tax policy and tax politics.

Widely regarded as one of the biggest foreign policy blunders the U.S. has ever been a part of, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 was the brain-child of Eisenhower, but was finalized under Kennedy and his administration.  This exhibit traces the path of Cuban-American relations immediately leading up to the invasion, recounts on the invasion itself, and maps its legacy.  This event is often overshadowed by the Cuban Missile crisis, which Kennedy handled remarkably well, due in part with his learning from the Bay of Pigs.  

The grand opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 became an intense political standoff during the Cold War and helped bolster the United States’s prestige worldwide. Vice President Nixon and Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev argued over the ideologies of American capitalism and Soviet communism in the middle of a model kitchen displayed at the fair. This “kitchen debate” was an American propaganda victory for it validated that capitalism was the superior ideology. This debate illustrated that consumerism not only benefited the nation economically, but it could also be used as a way to delegitimize the Soviet Union.

American consumption, particularly the rise of television purchases, emerged as a propaganda weapon against Russia during the Cold War. The American economy prospered during the 1950s as consumption boomed after years of pent-up demand on goods such as televisions. Consumerism was thereafter seen as a way to boost the United States economically, and it seemingly provided a more egalitarian society without a massive social upheaval like under the tenets of communism. This cultural shift from saving to spending played a vital role in Cold War politics and had lasting implications on the United States politically, economically, and socially.