INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin in Dallas.

At the time of his election in 1960, Kennedy was the youngest president ever at age 43.

Raymond Haberski, a professor of history at IUPUI, said Kennedy inspired a new generation of Americans. “John Kennedy and his family offered a certain kind of hope and a vision of a different kind of America.”

Many people who were old enough at the time remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated.

“It is one of the things that kicks off the era of conspiracy theories that we still live within,” Haberski said.

In 1964, a bipartisan commission determined that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president. Yet, some Americans still can’t wrap their heads around the notion that one man could bring down a presidency.

“Many people think that if Kennedy had lived, Kennedy would not have gotten the United States as deeply into Vietnam as America did go in. There would not have been a draft, there would not have been protests, there would not have been the sizes or the radical movement that took place,” Haberski said.

Kennedy’s assassination also ushered in decades of skepticism and a lack of faith that some Americans feel about their government.

“It’s one of those defining moments that have become part of popular culture as much as anything else. You can see references to it in every generation since the 1960s,” Haberski said.

Kennedy supported legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed after his assassination and was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The law banned discrimination based on race, color or sex.