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Second Red Scare
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State.After World War II, the second Red Scare happened due to a fear of communist espionage. In the midst of the Berlin Blockade, a Soviet Eastern Europe and both the Korean and Chinese Civil War, people were very afraid of the threat of communism. -
Creation of the United Nations
The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future world wars, and succeeded the League of Nations, which was characterized as ineffective. On 25 April 1945, 50 nations met in San Francisco, California for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, which was adopted on 25 June 1945. -
Suez Crisis
What led to the Suez Crisis? The Suez Crisis was the result of the American and British decision not to finance Egypt's construction of the Aswan High Dam, in response to Egypt's growing ties with communist Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. -
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference caused tension because the focus was shifting from winning the Second World War to how to organize and divide the world following the Second World War. Each party at the conference had different interests and some were in conflict. -
Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference resulted in divisions of Germany through reparations of each allied sides occupation zones, and divisions of European countries between the US and the USSR. After the division between the free world and communist camps, Stalin brought down an Iron Curtain to keep invasions from the West out. -
Period: to
cold war
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Berlin Blockade
Berlin blockade, international crisis that arose from an attempt by the Soviet Union, in 1948–49, to force the Western Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions in West Berlin. -
Creation of NATO
When was NATO created and why?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. -
Creation of the Iron Curtain/Warsaw Pact
The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states.Iron Curtain, the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. -
Space Race
The Soviet Union sent the first woman into space and was the first country to have a person go outside of a spacecraft in outer space on a space walk. In February 1966 the Soviet Union came one step closer to the Moon by landing the first unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The plan anticipated that the Cuban people and elements of the Cuban military would support the invasion. The ultimate goal was the overthrow of Castro and the establishment of a non-communist government friendly to the United States. -
Berlin Crisis of 1961
The Berlin Crisis of 1958–1959 was a crisis over the status of West Berlin during the Cold War. It resulted from efforts by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to react strongly against American nuclear warheads located in West Germany, and build up the prestige of the Soviet satellite state of East Germany. -
Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was dominated by the Soviet Union from 1945. It joined the Warsaw Pact in 1955 and remained a member until the Pacts dissolution in 1991. A 1968 attempt to introduce political reforms in Czechoslovakia was crushed by an invasion of Warsaw Pact forces. -
Soviet-Afghan War
The United States went to Afghanistan in 2001 to wage a necessary war of self-defense. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked our country. They were able to plan and execute such a horrific attack because their Taliban hosts had given them safe haven in Afghanistan. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled. East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by loosening the borders, making travel easier for East Germans. -
Fall of the Soviet Union
The unsuccessful August 1991 coup against Gorbachev sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Planned by hard-line Communists, the coup diminished Gorbachev's power and propelled Yeltsin and the democratic forces to the forefront of Soviet and Russian politics.