Answer and Explanation:
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across the world; in most countries, it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the global economy can decline.
For the United States, 1945–1964 was a time of high economic growth and general prosperity. It was also a time of confrontation as the capitalist United States and its allies politically opposed the Soviet Union and other communist countries; the Cold War had begun. African Americans united and organized, and a triumph of the Civil Rights Movement ended Jim Crow segregation in the South. Further laws were passed that made discrimination illegal and provided federal oversight to guarantee voting rights.
An active foreign policy was pursued to help Western Europe and Asia recover from the devastation of World War II. The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe rebuild from wartime devastation. The main American goal was to contain the expansion of Communism, which was controlled by the Soviet Union until China broke away about 1960. An arms race escalated through increasingly powerful nuclear weapons. The Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of European satellites to oppose the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. The U.S. fought a bloody, inconclusive war in Korea and was escalating the war in Vietnam as the period ended. Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, and when the USSR sent in nuclear missiles to defend it, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was triggered with the U.S., the most dangerous point of the era.
The Cold War made Americans very paranoid, fearing communist enemies from within and from without. To some degree, this paranoid sentiment caused Americans to seek comfort in their houses and neighborhoods. During the 1950s, there was an explosion of home building and of the construction of highways, as returning servicemen started families and moved to the suburbs in large numbers. The explosion of suburbia during this time was in part an outgrowth of the Baby Boom (which refers to the population explosion that occurred as war vets had children), and it was also an outgrowth of the American desire for comfort and reassurance in their homes and towns.