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Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution occurred when peasants and working class people of Russia revolted against the government of Tsar Nicholas II. They were led by Vladimir Lenin and a group of revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks. The new communist government created the country of the Soviet Union. -
Potsdam Conference
The Big Three—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Harry Truman—met in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to negotiate terms for the end of World War II. Although the Allies remained committed to fighting a joint war in the Pacific, the lack of a common enemy in Europe led to difficulties reaching consensus concerning postwar reconstruction on the European continent. -
Atomic bomb - Hiroshima/Nagasaki
An American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. -
Iron Curtain
The name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. -
Truman Doctrine
President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. -
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. -
Hollywood 10
10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. -
Marshall Plann
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $12 billion in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
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. Eventually, the western powers instituted an airlift that lasted nearly a year and delivered much-needed supplies and relief to West Berlin. -
Berlin Airlift
In response to the Soviet blockade of land routes into West Berlin, the United States begins a massive airlift of food, water, and medicine to the citizens of the besieged city. For nearly a year, supplies from American planes sustained the over 2 million people in West Berlin. -
NATO
NATO is a formal alliance between the territories of North American and Europe. From its inception, its main purpose was to defend each other from the possibility of communist Soviet Union taking control of their nation. -
Soviet Bomb Test
On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. It came as a great shock to the United States because they were not expecting the Soviet Union to possess nuclear weapon knowledge so soon. -
Alger Hiss Case
State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. He was convicted of having perjured himself in regards to testimony about his alleged involvement in a Soviet spy ring before and during World War II. -
Korean War
The Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, 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. -
Rosenburg Trial
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. -
Battle of Dien Bien Phu
The climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was known for his aggressive interrogations of suspected Communists, and he eventually turned his investigations to army security, but the army in turn charged him with using improper influence to win preferential treatment for a former staff member, Pvt. G. David Schine. -
Geneva Conference
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. -
Warsaw Pact
A military alliance of communist nations in eastern Europe. Organized in 1955 in answer to NATO, the Warsaw Pact included Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. -
Hungarian Revolution
A nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies -
U2 Incident
During the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506. -
Berlin Wall
During the early years of the Cold War, West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
A 13-day 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. -
Assassination of Diem
Following the overthrow of his government by South Vietnamese military forces the day before, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother are captured and killed by a group of soldiers. The death of Diem caused celebration among many people in South Vietnam, but also lead to political chaos in the nation. -
Assassination of JFK
John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas while riding in a motorcade in Dealey Plaza. -
Tonkin Gulf Resolution
This authorized President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. -
Operation Rolling Thunder
U.S. military aircraft attacked targets throughout North Vietnam from March 1965 to October 1968. This massive bombardment was intended to put military pressure on North Vietnam’s Communist leaders and reduce their capacity to wage war against the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam. -
Tet Offensitve
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. -
Assassination of MLK
Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. -
Assassination of RFK
Presidential candidate 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 -
Invasion of Czechoslovakia
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, officially known as Operation Danube, was a joint invasion of Czechoslovakia by four Warsaw Pact nations – the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland – on the night of 20–21 August 1968. -
Riots of the Democratic convention
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters battle police in the streets, while the Democratic Party falls apart over an internal disagreement concerning its stance on Vietnam. -
Election of Nixon
Eight years after being defeated by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon defeats Hubert H. Humphrey and is elected president. -
Kent State
The Kent State shootings were the shootings of 4 unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, by members of the Ohio National Guard -
Nixon Visits China
U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China was an important step in formally 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. -
Ceasefire in Vietnam
President Richard Nixon of the USA ordered a ceasefire of the aerial bombings in North Vietnam. The decision came after Dr. Henry Kissinger, the National Security Affairs advisor to the president, returned to Washington from Paris, France with a draft peace proposal. -
Fall of Saigon
The capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam -
Reagan Elected
Ronald Reagan, originally an American actor and politician, became the 40th President of the United States serving from 1981 to 1989. His term saw a restoration of prosperity at home, with the goal of achieving "peace through strength" abroad. -
SDI Announced
President Reagan proposed the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an ambitious project that would construct a space-based anti-missile system. This program was immediately dubbed "Star Wars." -
Geneva Conference with Gorbachev
In Geneva, Switzerland, Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time to hold talks on international diplomatic relations and the arms race. -
'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 Berlin Wall
As the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section.
