-
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh: Ho Chi-Minh was born on May 19, 1890, in Nghe An Province, Vietnam. In 1921, he organized the Intercolonial Union. He was elected to the Committee of the Peasants' International Congress in 1923. In 1936, he took charge of China's Indochinese Communist party. -
Jules & Ethel Rosenberg
Jules & Ethel Rosenberg:Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 25, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. -
Armistice
Armistice:An armistice is a formal agreement of warring parties to stop fighting. It is not necessarily the end of a war, since it might be just a cessation of hostilities while an attempt is made to negotiate a lasting peace. -
Che Guevara
Che Guevara: Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. -
Berlin Wall
Berlin wall:As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany’s territories. They split the defeated nation into four “allied occupation zones”: The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France -
United Nations
United Nations: The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization established 24 October 1945, to promote international co-operation. A replacement for the ineffective League of Nations, the organization was created following the Second World War to prevent another such conflict. -
The Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine:The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. -
Belin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade:The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of France, Great Britain and the United States to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. -
Marshall plan
Marshall plan: The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the American initiative to aid Europe, in which the United States gave $17 billion (approximately $160 billion in current dollar value) in economic support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II. -
NATO
NATO:NATO membership is open to “any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” -
Korean War
Korean War: On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. -
landing at Inchon
landing at Inchon:On September 15, 1950, during the Korean War (1950-53), U.S. Marines force made a surprise amphibious landing at the strategic port of Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, about 100 miles south of the 38th parallel and 25 miles from Seoul. -
General Douglas MacArthur
General Douglas MacArthur:Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) was an American general who commanded the Southwest Pacific in World War II (1939-1945), oversaw the successful Allied occupation of postwar Japan and led United Nations forces in the Korean War (1950-1953). -
Vietcong
Vietcong: a member of the communist guerrilla movement in Vietnam that fought the South Vietnamese government forces 1954–75 with the support of the North Vietnamese army and opposed the South Vietnamese and US forces in the Vietnam War. -
Vietnam War Begins
Vietnam War Begins:The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact: Military alliance, established in 1955, of the soviet union and other communist states in europe -
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Senator Joseph McCarthy:Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957 -
NASA
NASA:NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA is a United States government agency that is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. The Space Age started in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik -
Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro:Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who served as Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and President from 1976 to 2008. -
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, commonly known as Jack Kennedy or by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. -
Bay of Pigs invasion
Bay of Pigs invasion: On April 17, 1961, 1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. -
Cuban Missle Crisis
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 in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores -
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a Russian politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. -
The Tet Offensive
The Tet Offensive:On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. -
Détente
detente: Détente (a French word meaning release from tension) is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow, May 1972. -
Salt Agreement
Salt Agreement:Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty and interim SALT agreement on May 26, 1972, in Moscow. For the first time during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union had agreed to limit the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals. -
Draft
draft:From 1940 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were drafted to fill vacancies in the armed forces which could not be filled through voluntary means. The draft was ended when the United States military moved to an all-volunteer military force. -
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan:President Ronald Reagan helped redefine the purpose of government and pressured the Soviet Union to end the Cold War. He solidified the conservative agenda for decades after his presidency -
Star Wars
Star Wars: The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The intent of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specifically the Soviet Union. With the tension of the Cold War looming overhead, the Strategic Defense Initiative was the United States’ response to possible nuclear attacks from afar -
Glasnost
Glasnost: in the former Soviet Union the policy or practice of more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information, initiated by leader Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985. -
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev:Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman. He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 -
Communism Collapses
Communism Collapses:On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall--the most potent symbol of the Cold War division of Europe--came down. Earlier that day, the communist authorities of the German Democratic Republic had announced the removal of travel restrictions to democratic West Berlin. Thousands of East Germans streamed into the West, and in the course of the night, celebrants on both sides of the wall began to tear it down -
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics abbreviated to USSR and SU or shortened to the Soviet Union, was a Marxist–Leninist state on the Eurasian continent that existed between 1922 and 1991 -
Superpower
superpower: a very powerful and influential nation (used especially with reference to the US and the former Soviet Union when these were perceived as the two most powerful nations in the world). -
38th parallel
38th parallel: The 38th parallel north is a circle of latitude that is 38 degrees north of the Earth's equatorial plane. It crosses Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean. -
Demilitarized zone
demilitarized zone: A demilitarized zone, DMZ or DZ is an area in which treaties or agreements between nations, military powers or contending groups forbid military installations, activities or personnel.