And Now, the Tasks of Peace: Containing Communism, Building Homes

At the end of one of the most eventful years in history, the front page of the Monitor recorded the beginning of a new era of United States dominance in world affairs.

From the White House, President Harry Truman appointed a US delegation to the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and dispatched retired Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to broker a truce between warring factions in China.

At the State Department, US diplomats waded into the first of dozens of postwar conflicts - this one in Indonesia - that would be generated by the rapid collapse of European colonialism.

Elsewhere in the administration, meanwhile, military experts made plans to consolidate the US armed forces and to proceed apace with the production of atomic weapons in anticipation of the hard task of containing communist expansion worldwide.

On the home front, the word was homes: thousands of low-cost houses, like those being built in Worcester, Mass., to address an explosion of consumer demand unleashed by the end of World War II.