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Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, held from February 4 to 11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the U.S., the United Kingdom and the U.S.S.R., represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. -
Berlin Declaration
By the Berlin Declaration of June 5, 1945, officially the "Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany and the assumption of supreme authority with respect to Germany by the Governments of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom and the French Republic" , the Allies of World War II assumed "supreme authority" over German territory and basic administrative issues were addressed. -
Potsdam Confernce
The Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof in Potsdam, occupied Germany, from 17 July to 2 August 1945. Participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The three powers were represented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. -
North Vietnam
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, generally known as North Vietnam, was a Marxist–Leninist government formed in 1945, laying claim to all of Vietnam yet comprising most of North Vietnam from September 1945 to December 1946, controlling territory throughout the country until 1954, and governing territory north of the 17th parallel until 1976. Later, Vietnam will go to war with the U.S. -
Iron Curtain Speech
Winston Churchill's speech for peace address of 5 March 1946,held at Westminster College, used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. -
Containment Policy
Containment is a military strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as the Cold War policy of the U.S. and its allies to prevent the spread of communism. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa, and Vietnam. -
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The Cold War
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Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During post - World War II in Germany, the U.S.S.R blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Western Allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutschmark from West Berlin. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion in economic support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II. The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-devastated regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, make Europe prosperous again,and prevent the spread of communism. -
Berlin Airlift
The American military government, set a total of daily supplies needed at 646 tons of flour and wheat, 125 tons of cereal, 64 tons of fat, 109 tons of meat and fish, 180 tons of dehydrated potatoes, 180 tons of sugar, 11 tons of coffee, 19 tons of powdered milk, 5 tons of whole milk for children, 3 tons of fresh yeast for baking, 144 tons of dehydrated vegetables, 38 tons of salt and 10 tons of cheese. -
NATO
This organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. NATO's headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, one of the 28 member states across North America and Europe. An additional 22 countries participate in NATO's Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programmes. -
Korean War - U.S. Involvement
In 1950 the Korea Peninsula was divided between a Soviet government in the north and an American government in the south. The division of Korea into two halves had come at the end of World War II. In August of 1945 the Soviet Union invaded Korea. Fearing that the Soviets intended to seize the entire peninsula from their position in the north, the United States quickly moved its own troops into southern Korea. -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the U.S.S.R. -
Eisenhower Presidency
His main legacy is the Interstate Highway System. He also signed the Civil Rights acts, completed desegregation of the United States Military, sent the National Guard to Arkansas to enforce racial integration, created NASA, and made the space race against Russia a high priority. He is consistently ranked by scholars and political historians as one of the ten greatest American presidents. -
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev was a Russian politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty among eight communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the Cold War. -
Vietnam War - American Involvment
In early 1965, the United States began air raids on North Vietnam and on Communist-controlled areas in the South; by 1966 there were 190,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam. North Vietnam, meanwhile, was receiving armaments and technical assistance from the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. -
Sputnik
The U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik to an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was visible all around the Earth and its radio pulses were detectable. This surprise 1957 success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the larger Cold War. -
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt formed by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the US authoritarian government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953 and continued sporadically until the rebels finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. The Movement organization later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Communist Party in October 1965. -
U2 Incident
The 1960 U-2 incident happened during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev when a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down in U.S.S.R. airspace. -
Kennedy Presidency
Notable events that occurred during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race—by initiating Project Apollo, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. -
Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA paramilitary group on 17 April 1961. A counter-revolutionary military, trained and funded by the U.S. government's CIA, Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the DRF and intended to overthrow the Communist government ruled by Fidel Castro. -
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. -
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie was the name given by the Western Allies to the Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War. -
JFK Assassination
John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was fatally shot by a sniper while traveling with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, in a presidential motorcade. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the U.S. Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. -
Nixon Presidency
Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974 when he became the only U.S. president to resign the office. Nixon had previously served as a U.S. representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. -
Apollo 11
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969. Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21. -
SALT I
SALT I is the common name for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement, also known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and was signed on May 26, 1972. SALT I froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new submarine launched ballistic missile launchers only after the same number of older intercontinental ballistic missile and SLBM launchers had been destroyed -
Nixon Visits China
U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to the Republic of China was an important step in formally normalizing relations between the U.S. and China. It marked the first time a U.S. president had visited China, which at that time considered the U.S. one of its foes, and the visit ended 25 years of separation between the two sides. -
SALT II
SALT II helped the United States to discourage the Soviets from arming their third generation ICBMs of SS-17, SS-19 and SS-18 types with many more Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). In the late 1970s the USSR's missile design bureaus had developed experimental versions of these missiles equipped with anywhere from 10 to 38 warheads each. -
Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War was a war fought by the Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel from October 6 to 25, 1973. The military combat actions during the war took place on Arab territory, mostly in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. -
Fall of Saigon
The Fall of Saigon was the capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. The event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period to the formal reunification of Vietnam into a socialist republic, governed by the Communist Party of Vietnam. -
Iran Hostage Crisis
Fifty-two American citizens were held hostage for 444 days, after a group of Iranian students, belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, who were supporting the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. -
Reagan Presidency
Reagan's presidency was named the "Reagan Revolution," in recognition of the political realignment in the U.S. in favor of conservative domestic and foreign policies. The Reagan administration took a directly anti-communist stance towards the U.S.S.R., actively seeking a collapse of the U.S.S.R. as well as an end to the Cold War. -
Korean Air Lines, Flight 007
On September 1, 1983, the airliner was shot down by a Soviet fighter jet near the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Lawrence McDonald, Representative from Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives -
"Tear Down This Wall!" Speech
"Tear down this wall!" was the challenge issued by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to U.S.S.R. leader Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the Berlin Wall, in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin. -
Tiananmen Square Massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were student-led popular demonstrations in Beijing which took place in 1989 and received broad support from city residents, exposing deep splits within China's political leadership. The protests were forcibly suppressed by hardline leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the country's capital. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
On 13 June 1990, the East German military officially began dismantling the wall, beginning around the Mitte district. -
Gulf War
The Gulf War for operations leading to the buildup of troops and defense of Saudi Arabia and Operation Desert Storm in its combat phase, was a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. -
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was formally enacted on December 26, 1991, as a result of the declaration no. 142-Н of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, acknowledging the independence of the erstwhile Soviet republics and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States although five of the signatories ratified it much later or not at all.
