cold war- its was called the cold war because it featured heavyweight, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally at peace.
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formation of the eastern bloc
The Eastern bloc originated at the end of World War II. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pledged to hold free and fair democratic elections in eastern European countries that the Red Army had liberated Rather than carrying out this promise, occupying Soviet forces supported takeovers by local communist parties and the restructuring of eastern European governments and economies according to the Stalinist model. -
postwar occupation and division of Germany
After the Potsdam conference, Germany was divided into four occupied zones: Great Britain in the northwest, France in the southwest, the United States in the south and the Soviet Union in the east. Germany also lost territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, which fell under Polish control. About 15 million ethnic Germans living in this territory were forced to leave. -
Greek civil war
When the Second World War (WWII) ended in 1945 and the rest of Europe was beginning to rebuild itself, Greece entered into a second war, more vicious than that fought against the Axis powers. If eight percent of the population of seven million had died or been killed during WWII, the Greek civil war (GCW) brought that figure up to ten percent. -
berlin blockade and airlift
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of the United States, Great Britain and France to travel to their respective sectors of the city of Berlin. The Soviets blocked all rail, road and canal access to the western zones of Berlin. Suddenly, some 2.5 million civilians had no access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity and other basic goods. -
enactment of Marshall plan
The Marshall plan was a program that provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent of Europe. -
Chinese communist revolution
The Chinese Communist Revolution was a political upheaval that ended the imperial era and brought the Communist Party to power in China. -
Korean war
The Korean War was fought between North Korea and South Korea. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union while South Korea was supported by the United States and US-led United Nations (UN) forces. -
Cuban revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed uprising led by Fidel Castro that eventually toppled the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. -
Overthrow of the Guatemalan government
The overthrow of the Guatemalan government occurred when the CIA launched a covert operation to depose the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman -
Vietnam war
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. -
bay of pig's invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed attack launched by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. -
building the Berlin wall
he German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascist Scher Schutz wall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, -
Cuban missile crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. -
Prague spring
The Prague Spring (Czech: Prazské Jaro, Slovak: Prazské jar) was a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. -
overthrown of the Allende government in Chile
On September 11, 1973, a successful coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. During the bombing of the presidential palace by the Chilean Air Force, President Allende, after mounting a brief armed resistance against the military, eventually died by suicide -
Soviet war in Afghanistan
On Christmas Eve 1979, the Soviet Union began an invasion of Afghanistan, its Central Asian neighbor to the south. First, it air-dropped elite troops into principal Afghan cities. Soon after, it deployed motorized divisions across the border. Within days, the KGB, which had infiltrated the Afghan presidential palace, poisoned the president and his ministers, helping launch a Moscow-backed coup to install a new puppet leader, Babrak Karmal. -
Tiananmen square massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations in 1989 calling for democracy, free speech and a free press in China. Pro-democracy protesters initially marched through Beijing to Tiananmen Square with the protest’s numbers increasing to the tens of thousands by mid-May. The protests were halted in a deadly crackdown, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, by the Chinese government -
fall of the Berlin wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall a pivotal event in world history which marked the falling of the Iron Curtain and the start of the fall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. The wall fell partly because of a bureaucratic accident but it fell amid a wave of revolutions that left the Soviet-led communist bloc teetering on the brink of collapse -
fall of the Soviet Union
Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. -
9/11 attacks
On September 11, 2001, terrorists aboard three hijacked passenger planes carried out coordinated suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing everyone on board the planes and nearly 3,000 people on the ground. A fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board, after passengers and crew attempted to wrest control from the hijackers.