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Enactment of Marshall Plan
On April 3, 1948, President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, who in 1947 proposed that the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, imposed the Berlin Blockade from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949, cutting off all land and river transit between West Berlin and West Germany. The Western Allies responded with a massive airlift to come to West Berlin's aid. -
Postwar occupation and division of Germany
Decided, would divide Germany into occupation zones, with the Soviet zone extending to the Elbe and a French zone carved out of the Anglo-American spheres. Berlin would likewise be placed under four-power control. -
Chinese Communist Revolution
Militarily, the revolution culminated with the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) as the People's Liberation Army decisively defeated the Republic of China Army, bringing an end to over two decades of intermittent warfare between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Communists) and the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalists). -
Korean War
North Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, igniting the Korean War. Cold War assumptions governed the immediate reaction of US leaders, who instantly concluded that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest. Communism, President Harry S. Nobody won -
Cuban Revolution
It began with the assault on the Moncada Barracks on 26 July 1953 and ended on 1 January 1959, when Batista was driven from the country and the cities Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba were seized by revolutionaries, led by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's surrogates Raúl Castro and Huber Matos, respectively. -
Overthrow of the Mossadegh Government in Iran
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d'état , was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs invasion was an abortive invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by some 1,500 Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro. The invasion was financed and directed by the U.S. government -
Building the Berlin Wall
On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West -
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. -
Rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Arabic Munaẓẓamat al-Taḥrīr Filasṭīniyyah, is an umbrella political organization claiming to represent the world’s Palestinians—those Arabs, and their descendants, who lived in mandated Palestine before the creation there of the State of Israel in 1948. It was formed in 1964 to centralize the leadership of various Palestinian groups that previously had operated as clandestine resistance movements. It came into prominence only after the Six-Day War of June -
Overthrow of the Allende government in Chile
During a concerted attack on the presidential palace, Allende died, and the manner of his death became a subject of controversy. Military officials claimed that he had committed suicide, while others believed that he had been killed and that an apparent suicide had been staged -
Soviet War in Afghanistan
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24 1979 under the pretext of upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty. The treaty was signed in 1978 and the two countries agreed to provide economic and military assistance -
Tiananmen Square Massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests, also known as the June Fourth Incident in China, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
On November 9, 1989, 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 -
Fall of the Soviet Union
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, thereafter replaced by the Russian tricolor. Earlier in the day, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state. -
Overthrow of the Guatemalan Government
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, code-named Operation PBSuccess, was a covert operation carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954. -
Formation of the Eastern Bloc
During the opening stages of World War II, the Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War by invading and then annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics by agreement with Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. -
9/11 Attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were a series of four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by the militant Islamic extremist network al-Qaeda against the United States.