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Suez Canal
Summary: The Suez Canal is a man-made waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea.
Significant: The Suez Canal is an important route for transporting energy, raw materials, consumer goods, and components from Asia and the Middle East to Europe. End date: 1975 -
Red Scare
Summary: A red scare is the promotion of fear that society or the state will create communism, anarchism, or other left-wing ideologies.
Significant: During the Red Scare of 1919–1920, many in the United States feared recent immigrants and dissidents, especially those who embraced communist, socialist, or anarchist ideologies. End date: 1920 -
Truman Doctrine
To summarize 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.
Significance: The Truman Doctrine effectively changed U.S. foreign policy, moving away from the usual position of withdrawing from regional conflicts in which the United States was not directly involved, to one of intervention in distant conflicts. End date:1989 -
Marshall Plan
Summary: The Marshall Plan secured markets for American goods created reliable trading partners and encouraged the development of stable democratic governments in Western Europe.
Significance: The Marshall Plan led to a renaissance of industrialization in Europe and brought massive investment to the region. End date: December 1951 -
Berlin Blockade/Airlift
Summarize: As Soviet troops blocked railways, roads, and waterways in the Allied-controlled areas of Berlin.
Significance: The Allied response in the form of the Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Airlift represented the first major conflict of the Cold War. End date: 5/12/1949 -
Space Race
Summary: Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop space capabilities such as artificial satellites, unmanned space probes, and human spaceflight.
Significant: The space race played an important role in the Cold War as the Americans and Soviets competed to prove their technological and intellectual superiority by being the first nations to send humans into space. End date: 7/17/1975 -
U-2 Incident
Summary: The U-2 incident is a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in 1960 when a U.S. spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union.
Significant: The United States secretly gathered information about Soviet missile capabilities through photographs taken by Soviet U-2 spy planes.
End date: 1960 -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Summary: Landed on the beach along the Bay of Pigs and immediately came under heavy fire. Cuban planes shot down the invaders, sinking two escort ships and destroying half the air support of the exiles.
Significance: The Cuban government's victory cemented Castro's role as a national hero and widened the political divide between the two former allies. End date: 4/20/1961 -
Berlin Wall
Summarize: The Berlin Wall was built during the Cold War by the German Democratic Republic to prevent its population from fleeing from Soviet-controlled East Berlin to West Berlin, which was controlled by the main Western Allies.
Significance: The East-West ideological divide that ran throughout Europe during the Cold War also developed between the two superpowers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies. End date: 11/9/1989 -
Cuban Missile Crisis
Summarize: The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major confrontation in 1962 that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba.
Significance: A direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the closest the two superpowers ever came to nuclear conflict.
End date: 10/29/1962 -
Non-Proliferation Treaty
Summary: The NPT is an important historical international agreement aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, promoting cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, disarming nuclear weapons, and furthering the goals of general and complete disarmament.
Significant: The distribution of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons technology, and fissile material to countries that do not already possess them. End date: 1995 -
Perestroika and Glasnost
Summary: Perestroika was a reformist political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (USSR) in the late 1980s, associated with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his fame.
Significant: The collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the end of the cold war. End date: 1991