how the Cold War impacted lives of Americans from 1945 to 1990.?

Glad you decided to ask this again. I tried to respond to your email but it wouldn't send! Here's the answer I wrote for this very question:

ok, so how did the cold war affect people from the 1940s thru the

1990s. well, lets break it down a bit - affect people how? we could go thru

economic effects, societal effects, and political effects just to give

three nice categories. haha, you'll notice if you havent already that

im whipped into using examples in sets of three, essay writing gets you

into that habit pretty quick when yr just shooting them out left and

right to profs.

if you want to break it down that way it makes it pretty easy to write

about. economy wise you can go thru decade by decade and mark important

stuff that happened that would affect the economy, wars, space races,

arms races, etc. you really jsut need to keep in mind that everything

costs money and then figure out where the money comes from. in the US its

a lot of taxes, in the Soviet Union its a bit different, but a bit more

interesting. im not sure if you want to discuss how soviet citizens

were affected, but you could just to be a little smart *** if this is

indeed a paper lol history profs love when you think outside the "western

world" box. economy stuff is pretty easy because its concrete and the

paperwork tends to be there all of the time (one thing historians love

about the USSR is that for some strange reason they were very very

organized, they did their paperwork in triplicate!).

society wise is a little more difficult, but a lot of kids find that to

be the more entertaining part about history. you can really talk about

anything at this point, pop culture plays into it quite a bit... um..

space stuff too really defined the cold war era. without the cold war

there would have been no moon landing (well, thats impossible to say for

certain, but its pretty well accepted that the space race between the

US and Soviets was the main cause of us getting to the moon, right).

again, society stuff is simple. just think of anything that people did

that could have been a result of the cold war.. you could even tie it into

economics with bomb shelters or something similar. during the cold war

bomb shelter manufacturers made tons of money selling bomb shelters to

people who were afraid of being vapourised by atom bombs - but if you

get right to the point, people being afraid of atom bombs is a societal

thing, while purchasing bomb shelters is an economic thing.

again, i cant stress how much people overthink history. you dont have

to spend hours and hours researching somethings, a lot of it is just

making up things on the spot (but just be careful what you make up is

*true* meaning that nobody can provide *fact* that contradicts it - data

is different than fact, and data can tell you a lot of contradictory

things, so dont be too worried if so and so in whatever textbook has a

different take on why people bought bomb shelters!).

politically things get harder to explain because you have to deal with

motives and intentions. i had a prof tell me that he always catches

hell for trying to state intentions of people who are dead because, of

course, theres no way to say for certain whos right or wrong. i think its

ok to state intention if you see it. its all logical building up from

one idea to the next. especially with the cold war where it sorta

compiled incident after incident - what prompts what and what were the actual

intentions despite the results (and how can you determine intentions?).

again, try to work in a little of economy and society into the

politics. why did so and so decide to do this? well, because he was broke and

the people were pissed. how many things can you explain with that

sentence!

I was in a Catholic grade school in the 70's. I can remember loosing sleep at night fearing nuclear war. I remember the nuns telling us that the Soviets where godless hate mongers bend on taking over the world.

It put "Long Island" in the $$$$$$ "Grumman, Fairchild, Sperry, and tons of other small defense contractors, "GRUMMAN" was SO HUGE, that it had it's own stop on the "Long Island Rail Road", "Grumman will be the next stop, tickets please, all tickets". I sometimes would see an "E-2C" radar plane (Big Dome) land there for repairs, it would come right over the beach as I fished the North Shore, 4 tail booms, IT WAS COOL !

This requires too long of an answer....

The cold war made alot of ppls lives shitty.

One effect is that it brought about a siege mentality to a considerable extent.