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Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in 1917. These revolutions started because the people of Russia wanted to get rid of the Tsarist Autocracy and replace with it with the Soviet Union. -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name of the boundary that separated Europe into two parts. It was an attempt from the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with non-Soviet controlled areas. It was taken away in 1991 at the end of the cold war. -
Potsdam Conference
The conference was held from July 17 to August 2, 1945 to decide how to administer the defeated Nazi Germany. The goals of the conference also included the establishment of post-war order, peace treaty issues, and countering the effects of the war. -
Atomic Bomb - Nagasaki/Hiroshima
The names of the two bombs that the U.S. had dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are "Fatman" and "little boy". The bombing of Japan made Russia very angry and scared of the U.S. -
Molotov Plan
The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy created in March. It was written to contain Russia's geopolitical expansion of communism. -
The Hollywood 10
They were a group of people who screenwriters and directors that were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted after refusing to answer questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. They were accused of injected communist propaganda in their films -
Marshall Plan
The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-devastated regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, make Europe prosperous once more, and prevent the spread of communism. -
Berlin Blockade
The Soviet Union had put a blockade on Berlin to block the Western allies from western Berlin. They had promised to take it down if the the allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutsche mark. It was taken down on May 12, 1949. -
Berlin Airlift
An operation to give supplies to the people of West Berlin, which was a difficult feat given the size of the city's population. It lasted from 26th of June 1948 to 30th of September 1949. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created on April 4, 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. -
Soviet Bomb Test
The Soviet Union successfully detonates their first atomic bomb, code name "First Lightning". They built a "city" around the bomb test site to measure the effects of the bomb. -
Alger Hiss Case
Alger Hiss was a U.S. government official who was accuse of being a Soviet spy in 1948. He was convicted in 1950. -
Korean War
The Korean War began when North Korea invade South Korea, the U.S. and U.N. assisted South Korea. It ended July 27, 1953 -
Rosenberg Trial
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were U.S. citizens that were executed for the conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. They were instrumental in the transmission of information about top-secret military technology and prototypes of mechanisms related to the atomic bomb, which were of value to the Soviet nuclear weapons program and also provided top-secret radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines to the Soviet Union -
Battle of Dien Bien Phu
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union and Viet Minh. It was a set piece battle to draw out the Vietnamese and destroy them with superior firepower. It ended on May 7, 1954. -
Army-McCarthy Hearings
The Army–McCarthy hearings were a series of hearings held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations between April 1954 and June 1954. The hearings were held for the purpose of investigating conflicting accusations between the United States Army and Senator Joseph McCarthy. -
Geneva Conference
The Geneva Conference was a conference among several nations that took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in order to settle outstanding issues resulting from the Korean War and discuss the possibility of restoring peace in Indochina. It ended on July 20, 1954. -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO. -
Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. -
U2 Incident
The U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace. Initially the United States government tried to cover up the plane's purpose and mission, but was forced to admit its military nature when the Soviet government came forward with the captured pilot and remains of the U-2 including spying technology that had survived the crash as well as photos of military bases in the Soviet Union taken by the aircraft. -
The Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military attempt to invade Cuba. It was sponsored by the CIA but played out by a counter-revolutionary military made up of Cuban exiles who traveled to the United States after Castro's takeover. -
The Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin. The Berlin Wall was officially referred to as the "Anti-Fascist Protective Wall" by GDR authorities, implying that the NATO countries and West Germany in particular were considered equal to "fascists" by GDR propaganda. -
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.(October 16–28, 1962) -
The Assassination of Diem
The Assassination of Diem marked the culmination of a CIA backed coup or seizure of South Vietnam. He was assassinated after being arrested and on the way to military headquarters. -
JFK Assassination
JFK was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade by Lee Harvey Oswald at 12:30 p.m CST. -
Tonkin Gulf Resolution
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution is of historical significance because it gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia. -
Operation Rolling Thunder
Operation Rolling thunder was that title of the aerial bombardment on North Vietnam carried out by the U.S. It ended on November 2, 1968. -
TET Offensive
The TET Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. -
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. -
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after winning the California presidential primaries in the 1968 election, and died the next day while hospitalized. -
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
It was a joint invasion of Czechoslovakia by four Warsaw Pact groups; the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. It started on August 20, 1968 and ended on August 21, 1968. -
Democratic National Convention of 1968
The convention was visited by 10,000 demonstrators apart of the groups the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Youth International Party. It was a violent demonstration. It ended on August 29, 1968. -
Election of Nixon
Former president Richard Nixon was elected on November 5, 1968. It was a realigning election because it had disrupted the New Deal Coalition permanently that ad omitted politics for 36 years. -
Kent State Massacre
The National Guard fired on unarmed college students that were protesting the Vietnam war. They killed four students and wounded nine others, one of which received permanent paralysis -
Nixon's visit to China
Former president Richard Nixon visited the People's Republic of China which was a huge step towards normalizing relations between the United States and China. It marked the first time a U.S. president had visited the PRC, which at that time considered the U.S. one of its foes, and the visit ended 25 years of separation between the two sides. He came back on February 28, 1972. -
Ceasefire in Vietnam
The Paris Peace Accords was a treaty to bring peace to Vietnam and end the Vietnam War. It also ended U.S. direct military combat, and temporarily stopped the fighting between North and South Vietnam. -
The Fall of Saigon
The capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong.The event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period to the formal reunification of Vietnam under the Socialist Republic. -
Election of Reagan
Reagan, aided by the Iran hostage crisis and a worsening economy at home marked by high unemployment and inflation, won the election by a landslide, receiving the highest number of electoral votes ever won by a non-incumbent presidential candidate. -
The Strategic Defense Initiative
The SDI was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the U.S. from ballistic strategic nuclear weapons. It was given the name Star Wars. The system, which was to combine ground-based units and orbital deployment platforms, was first publicly announced by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983. -
Geneva Conference with Gorbachev
The Geneva Summit of 1985 was a Cold War-era meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. It was held on November 19 and 20, 1985, between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The two leaders met for the first time to hold talks on international diplomatic relations and the arms race. During the meeting and there after, Reagan and Gorbachev became friends and wrote letters to each other. -
‘Tear down this wall’ speech
"Tear down this wall!" is a line from a speech made by US President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, calling for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open up the barrier which had divided West and East Berlin since 1961. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Cold War by deciding to agree to tear down the Berlin Wall and to officially dissolve the U.S.S.R on his last day of office.
