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Period: to
Cold War
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The Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was named after U.S. secretary of state George Marshall, who provided $13 billion for rebuilding Europe. The plan helped Western Europe make a rapid recovery from the war, and it also helped preserve political stability. -
Berlin Airlift and Blockade
The U.S. and Britain proposition to change West Berlins currency brought chaos to the Soviet Union. The Soviets then blocked the land routes, water routes, and rail routes that links between West Germany and West Berlin to keep western influence out of Stalin's West Berlin. -
War in Korea
The Soviet Union and the United States agreed to temporarily divide Korea in half. The Soviets established a Communist government in the northern half of Korea while in the south, the United States supported a non-Communist regime. The North Koreans attacked South Korea in 1950 to unite the country under a Communist government. -
Postwar Recovery
In the U.S. debts grew sharply as the federal government increasingly spent more money than it received in taxes. At the end of World War II, much of Western Europe lay in ruins. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been killed in World War II, and the nation's cities, farms, and industries had suffered heavy damage. -
NATO and the Warsaw Pact
The United States, Canada, and most Western European countries joined together in a military alliance known as NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was designed to counter Soviet power in Europe. The Warsaw Pact was an agreement that the Soviet Union and the Communist nations of Eastern Europe formed. -
Vietnam War
Vietnam was temporarily divided into northern and southern halves in an agreement of the French giving up control. Communists controlled the North and an anti-Communist regime ruled the South. When a revolution began in the South, the United States sent military aid to fight the rebels. -
The Berlin Wall is Built
Two days after sealing off free passage between East and West Berlin with barbed wire, East German authorities began building a wall to permanently close off access to the West. East German authorities declared the wall would protect their citizens from the harmful influence of corrupt capitalist culture. -
Communism in Cuba
In 1959 rebels under the leadership of Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba's dictator and installed a Communist government. The U.S. government, seeking to overthrow Castro secretly trained an invasion force of approximately 1,500 Cubans who had fled Castro's regime. In 1962 came the Cuban missile crisis, a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. -
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin chanting to "open the gate." People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. -
Soviet Union Collapse
When Lithuania declared independence of 1990, it appeared that other republics planned to do the same. Communist Party leaders sought to end Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and preserve the Soviet Union by taking over the Soviet government in a coup d'etat. The coup had failed but Gorbachev's power was largely gone and soon the Soviet government ceased to function.
