Continuity and Change in Period 8 | AP US History Unit 8 Lesson 15

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

Apply the three components of the AP Continuity and Change reasoning process (3.i, 3.ii, and 3.iii) to developments drawn from across Period 8, 1945 to 1980.
Identify, on each of six thematic axes, at least one significant shift and one stubborn continuity between the postwar moment of 1945 and the conservative resurgence of 1980.
Account for why some inheritances of the New Deal era survived the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and the stagflation of the 1970s, even as the postwar liberal consensus broke apart.
Argue, with specific evidence drawn from at least three points across the period, whether change or continuity is the more historically consequential pattern.
Construct an LEQ thesis that defends a defensible position on a Continuity and Change prompt and that identifies a specific historical context for the argument.

Key Concepts

From a distance, Period 8 looks like a single sweeping transformation. A wartime command economy became a peacetime consumer republic. Legal segregation across the Jim Crow South was dismantled by federal statute and Supreme Court decision. The Great Society wrote Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, federal aid to schools, and a federal voting-rights apparatus into the body of the welfare state. The Cold War organized American foreign policy from Truman to Carter, and then American forces left Saigon in defeat. The story is real, and the AP exam rewards students who can tell it with precision. The trouble is that the same thirty-five-year window also reveals something else: how much survived. The men who held office in 1980 were, by and large, raised by the New Deal. The federal welfare state that Reagan inherited was larger than the one Eisenhower had managed. Containment as a doctrine outlasted Vietnam. The corporate economy that produced the postwar boom also produced the deindustrial cities of the late 1970s. A thesis that captures only the change misses the more interesting historical question, which is why so much persisted across a period that was supposed to remake everything.

The synthesis task that closes Unit 8 is therefore double-sided. Students need a vocabulary for the changes (the Great Society, the Voting Rights Act, detente, the Vietnam Syndrome, the rise of the New Right) and a vocabulary for the continuities (containment, de facto segregation, corporate capitalism, the suburban norm, an Anglo-Protestant cultural mainstream). The AP Continuity and Change reasoning process is the tool that organizes the two together. It asks students to identify a pattern, to account for what produced it, and to weigh its significance. None of those moves is optional on the rubric. The LEQ analysis point goes only to responses that move beyond identification into causation and significance.

Three caution lines are worth drawing at the start of this lesson. First, change and continuity are not opposites in any simple sense. The civil rights revolution decisively dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow, and yet the racial geography of American housing and schooling in 1980 was, in some metropolitan areas, more segregated than it had been in 1954 (KC-8.2.I.B, KC-8.2.I.D). The shift in law and the persistence of practice happened simultaneously. Second, the same development can carry both threads. The Great Society was the most ambitious expansion of the federal welfare state since the New Deal and the program that, by funding the war on poverty without raising taxes during a hot war in Vietnam, set the inflationary spiral in motion that helped end the postwar consensus (KC-8.2.II.B, KC-8.2.III.D). Third, the bookend dates do not mark clean breaks. Many of the patterns that look like Period 8 changes (the conservative movement, the deindustrialization of the urban North, the women's movement) were already underway by 1945 or were not finished until well into Period 9.

"Stirred by a growing awareness of social inequalities and economic injustices, liberalism reached its high point in the mid-1960s with the civil rights movement and the social-welfare programs of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society."AP USH CED, KC-8.2.II (paraphrased)

Period 8 ends, in the College Board's framing, with the election of 1980. That choice is itself an argument about continuity and change. The Reagan victory was a genuine repudiation of the postwar liberal consensus, and the political coalition behind it (suburban whites, the Christian right, neoconservative defense intellectuals, the deregulatory wing of the business community) had been organizing inside the Republican Party since at least Goldwater's nomination in 1964 (KC-8.2.III.E, KC-8.2.III.F). The fact that it could win is the change. The fact that the Reagan administration spent its first term protecting Social Security, Medicare, and the bulk of the regulatory state it had run against is the continuity. Both observations are correct, and the LEQ rewards students who hold them in tension.

The Continuity and Change Reasoning Process

The College Board names three components of the Continuity and Change reasoning process. A response that earns the analysis point on the LEQ rubric must demonstrate at least one of them in service of the larger argument; a strong response demonstrates all three. Practice each one on the six axes listed below.

Component 3.i

Identify Patterns

Identify patterns of continuity or change over time. The student names the pattern: across these dates, in this domain, this is what stayed and this is what shifted.

Component 3.ii

Account for Causes

Account for the causes of those patterns. The student explains why the continuity persisted or what produced the shift, and identifies the conditions that mattered.

Component 3.iii

Assess Significance

Account for the effects, magnitude, or significance of the patterns. The student weighs whether the shift was decisive or partial, whether the continuity was inertia or active reproduction, and what was at stake.

Six Axes of Continuity and Change, 1945-1980

Use the table below as the anchor of the lesson. Each row asks one of the major Period 8 storylines to do its work. The left column names the shift; the right column names what stayed. A complete LEQ response will lean on three or four rows; a comprehensive review essay can cover all six.

Axis	What Changed	What Stayed
Federal Power Synthesis	ChangeThe Great Society wrote Medicare and Medicaid (1965), federal aid to elementary and secondary schools (1965), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), and a federal antipoverty apparatus into the welfare state (KC-8.2.II.B, KC-8.2.II.C). The conservative movement that elected Reagan in 1980 organized in direct opposition to that expansion.	ContinuityThe structural commitments of the New Deal welfare state (Social Security, federal mortgage insurance, the GI Bill apparatus, the regulatory agencies) survived into 1980 intact. Even Reagan's first-term budgets left Social Security and Medicare alone. The federal government in 1980 was larger and more active than in 1945.
Race Relations Synthesis	ChangeBrown v. Board (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968) dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow. Black voter registration in the South rose from a small fraction in 1960 to a near-majority of eligible voters by 1980; the number of Black elected officials grew from a handful to several thousand (KC-8.2.I.B, KC-8.2.I.C, KC-8.2.I.D).	ContinuityDe facto segregation in housing and schooling persisted, often deepened by white suburban flight, redlining, and the patterns of federal mortgage insurance. By the late 1970s, several northern metropolitan school systems were more racially separated than they had been at the time of Brown. Wealth and earnings gaps between Black and white households remained large.
Foreign Policy Synthesis	ChangeThe Vietnam defeat (1973-1975) produced the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, a public reluctance to commit American ground forces to extended foreign interventions. Nixon and Kissinger replaced rigid containment with detente, the SALT I arms-control treaty (1972), and the diplomatic opening to China (KC-8.1.II.B, KC-8.1.II.C).	ContinuityContainment of Soviet influence remained the framing assumption of American foreign policy from Truman through Carter. The network of NATO, bilateral Asian alliances, and overseas bases that the postwar national-security state built between 1947 and 1953 was still in place at the end of the period.
Economy Synthesis	ChangeThe postwar economic boom of 1945 to roughly 1973 gave way to the stagflation of the 1970s: simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment, two oil shocks (1973 and 1979), and the early stages of deindustrialization in the manufacturing belt. The Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971; productivity growth slowed sharply (KC-8.3.I.B, KC-8.3.II.A).	ContinuityThe basic structure of the American economy (large corporations, Wall Street capital markets, mass consumer demand, suburban housing as the largest household asset, an automobile-centered transportation system) was the same in 1980 as in 1955. Capitalism was not at issue; the question was which mix of regulation and incentive would manage it.
Cultural Authority Synthesis	ChangeThe counterculture, the second-wave feminist movement, the Stonewall uprising and the gay rights movement that followed, and the Chicano, American Indian, and Asian American movements of the late 1960s and 1970s challenged the Anglo-Protestant, male-headed, heterosexual mainstream in courts, classrooms, workplaces, and popular culture (KC-8.2.I.E, KC-8.3.II.B).	ContinuityAn Anglo-Protestant cultural framework remained dominant in mass media, suburban civic life, and most political institutions. The evangelical mobilization of the late 1970s reasserted that framework as a political program, and helped elect Reagan. The shift in cultural authority was real but contested at every step.
Cold War Assumptions Synthesis	ChangeThe Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Tet Offensive and the loss of credibility of the Vietnam-era national-security state, and the Pentagon Papers (1971) eroded the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had held since 1947. By the late 1970s, the foreign-policy debate ran from human-rights idealism on the left to the neoconservative critique of detente on the right (KC-8.1.II.B, KC-8.1.II.D).	ContinuityThe bipolar contest with the Soviet Union remained the central organizing frame of American foreign policy. The arms race continued; nuclear deterrence remained the working strategy; the proxy contests in Africa, Latin America, and Southwest Asia continued to be read in Cold War terms by both parties through the 1980 election.

How to use the table on the LEQ. A defensible thesis takes a clear position on whether change or continuity is the more consequential pattern across the chosen axis or axes, and signals which body paragraphs will carry the weight. The strongest responses argue both, with the thesis identifying which side the argument ultimately favors, and with at least one body paragraph devoted to the counterweight. A response that names only changes (or only continuities) will not earn the complexity point.

Primary Source Excerpts

A synthesis lesson works best when its sources span the period. The three excerpts below mark the opening Cold War moment of 1947, the high point of liberal expansion in 1965, and the conservative turn at the close of the period in 1981. Read them as a set: each one anchors a different position on the continuity-change ledger.

Speech Avalon Project, Yale 1947

Harry S. Truman, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (March 12, 1947)

"I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes."

The Truman Doctrine speech opens Period 8. It frames the Cold War as a global contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes, and commits the United States to a permanent peacetime military and aid posture for the first time in its history. Use this excerpt as the period's baseline: the doctrine of containment that Truman articulated here outlived him by more than four decades. Set it against the Vietnam-era erosion of public faith in containment to see the continuity-and-change pattern in foreign policy at full magnification (KC-8.1.I.A).

Harry S. Truman, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947. Avalon Project, Yale Law School. View at the Avalon Project →

Document National Archives 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Public Law 89-110, August 6, 1965)

"No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color. ... Whenever the Attorney General institutes a proceeding under any statute to enforce the guarantees of the fifteenth amendment in any State or political subdivision the court shall authorize the appointment of Federal examiners by the United States Civil Service Commission."

The Voting Rights Act, signed by Lyndon Johnson five days after the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, was the most consequential piece of civil rights legislation in American history. It put the federal government in the business of overseeing local elections in the South, ended literacy tests, and produced an order-of-magnitude increase in Black voter registration over the next decade. Use this excerpt as the period's high-water mark for the federal civil rights project, and to test the limits of the legal-equality argument once de facto patterns of segregation in housing and schooling come into view (KC-8.2.I.C, KC-8.2.II.B).

Voting Rights Act of 1965, Public Law 89-110, 79 Stat. 437. Enacted August 6, 1965. National Archives. View at the National Archives →

Speech Reagan Library 1981

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (January 20, 1981)

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

Reagan's first inaugural was the formal close of the postwar liberal consensus and the opening of the conservative resurgence that organizes Period 9. The address was an argument about continuity and change in its own right: it framed the Great Society and the regulatory state of the 1970s as departures from an older American norm and promised to restore that norm. Use this excerpt to ask the synthesis question of Period 8: what did the Reagan coalition argue had changed across the years 1945 to 1980, and what did the policies of his first term reveal about how much actually had (KC-8.2.III.E, KC-8.2.III.F)?

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. View at the Reagan Library →

Discussion Questions

(Continuity and Change · Component 3.i) Choose any one of the six axes of change. State the pattern in a single sentence: across 1945 to 1980, in this domain, this is what shifted and this is what stayed. Defend the framing.
(Continuity and Change · Component 3.ii) Account for the causes of one major continuity in Period 8. Why did containment as a doctrine outlive defeat in Vietnam? Identify at least three contributing causes and rank them.
(Continuity and Change · Component 3.iii) Assess the significance of one major shift in Period 8. Was the dismantling of legal segregation the most consequential change of the period, or was the expansion of the federal welfare state through the Great Society, or the breakdown of the postwar economic consensus in the 1970s? Defend your ranking with evidence.
(Synthesis) Compare the federal welfare state in 1945 with the federal welfare state in 1980. The shift from one to the other is the headline change of Period 8. Identify two structural continuities between the two moments and account for why they survived the transition.
(Comparison) The phrase "freedom" appears in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, in the Voting Rights Act floor debates of 1965, and in Reagan's first inaugural of 1981. Trace its practical reach across these three moments. Whose freedom was at stake in each, and what kind?
(Causation) Account for the global setting that made Period 8 possible. How did decolonization, the bipolar superpower contest, the rise of the European Common Market, and the energy politics of the Middle East shape the continuity-and-change ledger inside the United States?

Classroom Activities

15 min

Six-Axis Gallery Walk

Print the six rows of the What Changed / What Stayed table on chart paper, one row per station. Working in pairs, students rotate through the stations and add a piece of specific evidence (an event, a document, a name, a date) to each side of every row. Debrief by asking which axis produced the most disagreement.

20 min

Three Sources Across Thirty-Five Years

Distribute the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and Reagan's First Inaugural (1981). Students complete a graphic organizer with three columns: situation, point of view, and intended audience. They finish by writing a two-sentence claim about what these three sources, taken together, reveal about continuity and change in Period 8.

10 min

Reasoning Process Drill

Project a sample LEQ thesis on the board. Working in pairs, students label each clause with the reasoning component it performs (3.i identifies a pattern, 3.ii accounts for causes, 3.iii assesses significance). Rewrite any thesis that performs only one component to perform all three.

30 min

LEQ Body Paragraph

Assign the LEQ prompt below. Students draft one body paragraph that develops a single axis of change with at least three pieces of specific evidence drawn from across the period. Peer review against the rubric: thesis claim, contextualization, evidence, and analysis using the Continuity and Change reasoning process.

Vocabulary

Continuity and Change

The AP reasoning process that identifies patterns of persistence or transformation, accounts for their causes, and assesses their significance.

Periodization

The historian's choice of where to draw the start and end of an era, and the argument that choice implies.

Synthesis

The act of bringing together evidence from across a period or theme to support a unified interpretive argument.

Containment

The American Cold War doctrine, articulated by George Kennan and adopted in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, of preventing the territorial expansion of Soviet influence through aid, alliances, and forward military presence.

Detente

The Nixon-Kissinger softening of Cold War tensions, expressed in SALT I (1972), the diplomatic opening to China, and a more transactional approach to the Soviet Union.

Great Society

President Lyndon Johnson's domestic program of 1964 to 1968, which produced Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to schools, the war on poverty, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

De Facto Segregation

Racial separation that persisted in housing, schooling, and employment without explicit legal sanction, often produced by federal mortgage insurance practice, white suburban flight, and local zoning.

Stagflation

The simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment that defined the American economy in the 1970s and that confounded the postwar Keynesian consensus on macroeconomic management.

Vietnam Syndrome

The post-1975 public reluctance to commit American ground forces to extended foreign interventions, often invoked as a constraint on presidential war-making during the Carter and early Reagan years.

New Right

The conservative political coalition of suburban whites, evangelical Christians, neoconservative defense intellectuals, and deregulatory business interests that organized in the 1970s and elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Second-Wave Feminism

The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s that produced the National Organization for Women, Title IX, the Equal Pay Act, and the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Postwar Liberal Consensus

The bipartisan political and policy framework, in force from roughly 1945 to the early 1970s, that combined Cold War containment, a managed Keynesian economy, and a gradually expanding federal welfare state.

Standards Alignment

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.

AP US History CED-ALIGNED

Themes

Unit 8 synthesisTopic 8.15 is a synthesis closer; the CED assigns no single Thematic Focus. The lesson asks students to draw across all of the Unit 8 themes used in earlier topics (WOR, NAT, WXT, MIG, ARC, SOC, PCE, GEO).

Historical Thinking Skill and Reasoning Process

Skill 6.DUse evidence to corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument that addresses a historical question.

Reasoning 3Continuity and Change — account for patterns of continuity or change across time.

Learning Objective

LO 8.QAccount for the extent to which the period from 1945 to 1980 produced fundamental change in American political, social, economic, and foreign-policy life, and identify the continuities that persisted across the period.

Key Concepts (full Period 8 set)

KC-8.1The United States responded to an uncertain and dangerous international setting by becoming the leader of the Western bloc and protecting and promoting its political, economic, and military interests around the world.

KC-8.1.IUnited States policymakers engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and its satellite states, seeking to limit the growth of communist political and military influence around the world.

KC-8.1.IICold War concerns and the costs of containment shaped American economic, social, and political life across the period, even as detente opened new diplomatic possibilities in the 1970s.

KC-8.2New movements for civil rights and liberal efforts to expand the role of government generated a range of political and cultural responses.

KC-8.2.ISeeking to fulfill the Reconstruction-era promise of civil rights, African Americans and other minority groups challenged the persistence of legal and de facto discrimination through legal action, mass protest, and federal political engagement.

KC-8.2.IILiberal expansion of the federal role reached its high point in the mid-1960s with the Great Society, which built Medicare, Medicaid, and a federal antipoverty apparatus on the foundation of the New Deal welfare state.

KC-8.2.IIIConservative responses to liberal expansion organized through the 1960s and 1970s and produced the political coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.

KC-8.3Postwar economic, demographic, and technological changes had a significant effect on American society, politics, and the environment.

KC-8.3.IEconomic prosperity, federal spending, and a growing population produced a society of mass consumption, the suburbs, the Sun Belt, and a youth-driven mass culture from 1945 through the early 1970s.

KC-8.3.IINew voices and movements challenged the postwar mainstream, including second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement, the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement, the environmental movement, and the New Right.

National Cross-Walks

NCSS Theme 2Time, Continuity, and Change — the discipline-defining task of identifying patterns of continuity and change over time.

NCSS Theme 6Power, Authority, and Governance — how the Great Society shifted the federal role while leaving the New Deal welfare state architecture in place.

NCSS Theme 9Global Connections — the Cold War setting that shaped both what changed and what stayed the same in postwar America.

C3 D2.His.1.9-12Account for how historical context shaped the perspectives of people in different times and places.

C3 D2.His.2.9-12Analyze change and continuity in historical eras.

C3 D2.His.16.9-12Integrate evidence from multiple sources and types into a coherent argument about the past.

CCSS RH.11-12.2Identify the central ideas of a primary or secondary source and provide a precise summary that relates the ideas to one another.

CCSS WHST.11-12.1Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content, supporting claims with logical reasoning and relevant evidence.

Discipline-Specific National Standards

NSH Era 9 · Std 1Account for the economic boom and social transformation of postwar United States society.

NSH Era 9 · Std 2Account for how the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and international politics.

NSH Era 9 · Std 3Account for domestic policies after World War II, including the civil rights movement, the Great Society, and the politics of the 1970s.

CCE Civics · Std IIIHow does the government established by the Constitution embody the purposes, values, and principles of American democracy?

CCE Civics · Std VWhat are the roles of the citizen in American democracy?

Other Assessment Frameworks

NAEP US History · G8 / G12Theme 1: Change and Continuity in American Democracy — the postwar era as the high-water mark of the federal welfare state and the moment its limits were tested.

AP World HistoryCross-reference Unit 8 (Cold War and Decolonization) — the American postwar story inside the global Cold War contest and the wave of decolonization that reshaped the international system.

AP US GovernmentCross-reference Unit 5 (Political Participation) and Unit 3 (Civil Liberties and Civil Rights) — the civil rights statutes of 1964 and 1965 as the foundational political-participation reforms of the modern American state.

AP Practice Questions

Multiple Choice Sample ~ 2 min

1Question: Which of the following developments most clearly illustrates the persistence of an earlier postwar pattern across Period 8 (1945-1980), even as the political and cultural order was transformed?

(A) The continued framing of American foreign policy around the doctrine of containment.
(B) The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
(C) The opening of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972.
(D) The mobilization of the evangelical Christian right as a political force in the late 1970s.
(E) The collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971.

Correct: (A). Containment, articulated in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and pursued through Korea, Vietnam, and the Carter administration's response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was the framing assumption of American foreign policy across the entire period. Options (B), (C), (D), and (E) all describe genuine shifts produced during Period 8 (KC-8.1.I.A, KC-8.1.II.B).

Short Answer Question ~ 12 min · 1 page

2Question: Using your knowledge of United States history from 1945 to 1980, answer all three parts that follow. The prompt practices the Continuity and Change reasoning process.

Identify ONE specific shift in the legal status of African Americans that occurred between 1945 and 1980.
Identify ONE specific continuity in American social or economic life that persisted from 1945 to 1980 despite the civil rights movement and the Great Society.
Account for ONE specific cause of either the shift you identified in part (a) or the continuity you identified in part (b).

Scoring: 1 point for each part. Strong responses to part (a) might cite Brown v. Board (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Part (b) responses might cite de facto segregation in housing and schooling, the racial wealth gap, the structural dominance of large corporations, the suburban norm, or the persistence of containment as a foreign-policy doctrine. Part (c) responses earn the point by identifying a specific causal mechanism (for example, that residential segregation persisted because federal mortgage insurance practice, local zoning, and patterns of suburban flight reinforced one another despite the legal end of restrictive covenants).

Document-Based Question Stem ~ 60 min · 7 documents

3Prompt: Account for the extent to which the period from 1945 to 1980 produced fundamental change in the federal government's role in American life, and identify the continuities that persisted despite that change. Build your argument with evidence drawn from the seven documents and from your own knowledge of the period.

The full seven-document set for this DBQ spans the bookends of Period 8 and lives in the Unit 8 practice exam packet (Document A: Truman Doctrine, 1947; Document B: Eisenhower Farewell Address on the military-industrial complex, 1961; Document C: Lyndon Johnson, Howard University commencement on equality of result, 1965; Document D: Voting Rights Act of 1965; Document E: Pentagon Papers excerpt, 1971; Document F: National Energy Plan and the second oil shock, 1979; Document G: Reagan First Inaugural Address, 1981).

Scoring framework: 1 point thesis (a defensible claim that responds to all parts of the prompt and uses the Continuity and Change reasoning process), 1 point contextualization, up to 4 points evidence (at least 3 documents used to support the argument, plus an outside-evidence point), 1 point sourcing (point of view, purpose, situation, audience for at least three documents), 1 point complexity. Maximum 7 points.

Long Essay Question Stem ~ 40 min · Continuity and Change

4Prompt: Account for the continuities and shifts in the federal government's role in American life between 1945 and 1980. In your response, demonstrate the Continuity and Change reasoning process: identify a clear pattern, account for what produced it, and assess its historical significance. Defend your argument with specific evidence drawn from at least three of the developments listed below: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, the interstate highway system, Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, and the election of 1980.

Scoring framework: 1 point thesis (a defensible claim that establishes a line of reasoning), 1 point contextualization (a broader historical context relevant to the prompt), 2 points evidence (at least two pieces of specific historical evidence, one of which directly supports the argument), 1 point analysis (the response uses the Continuity and Change reasoning process to frame or structure the argument, demonstrating components 3.i, 3.ii, or 3.iii), 1 point complexity (the response argues both shift and persistence, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the period). Maximum 6 points.