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Russian Revolution
Most Russians had lost faith in the leadership ability of Czar Nicholas II. Government corruption was rampant and the Russian economy remained backward. -
Soviet Bomb Test
A top-secret research and development program begun during World War II in the wake of the Soviet Union's discovery of the American, British, and Canadian nuclear project. -
Potsdam Conference
July 17, 1945 to August 2, 1945
The Big Three—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Harry Truman—met in Potsdam, Germany to negotiate terms for the end of World War II. -
Atomic bomb - Hiroshima/Nagasaki
August 6, 1945- August 9, 1945
The United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, during the final stage of World War II. -
Truman Doctrine
The principle that the US should give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or communist insurrection. -
Molotov Plan
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. -
Marshall Plan
1948- 1951
Sparked economic recovery, meeting its objective of ‘restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. -
Berlin Blockade
June 24, 1948 – May 12, 1949
One of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. -
Berlin Airlift
1948– 1949
At the end of the Second World War, U.S., British, and Soviet military forces divided and occupied Germany. Also divided into occupation zones, Berlin was located far inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. -
Alger Hiss Case
Accusation of espionage. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to denounce Alger Hiss. A senior editor at Time magazine, Chambers had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the Yalta agreements. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance. -
Korean War
Jun 25, 1950 – Jul 27, 1953
The Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal force, came to the aid of South Korea. China came to the aid of North Korea, and the Soviet Union gave some assistance. -
Rosenberg Trial
A court case involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Soviet Union. Some have argued that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of McCarthy-era hysteria against communists or of anti-Semitism (they were Jewish). -
Battle of Dien Bien Phu
March 13, 1954 – May 7, 1954
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. -
Geneva Conference
April 26 - July so, 1954
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. -
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
Oct 23, 1956 – Nov 10, 1956
A nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies -
U2 Incident
The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace. -
Berlin Wall
1961 to 1989
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin. -
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 on April 17, 1961. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
Oct 16, 1962 – Oct 28, 1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile. -
Assassination of Diem
The assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, marked the culmination of a successful CIA-backed revolution led by General Dương Văn Minh. -
Assassination of JFK
John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963 at 12:30 p.m Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas while riding in a motorcade in Dealey Plaza.[1] Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while he was riding with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, in a presidential motorcade. -
Operation Rolling Thunder
March 2, 1965 to November 2, 1968
Operation Rolling Thunder was the title of a gradual and sustained aerial bombardment campaign conducted by the U.S. 2nd Air Division, U.S. Navy, and Republic of Vietnam Air Force against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. -
Tet Offensive
The Tet Offensive was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, launched on January 30, 1968, by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces, and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. -
Election of Nixon
Two years after losing to Kennedy, Nixon ran for governor of California and lost in a bitter campaign against Edmund G Brown. Most political observers believed that Nixon’s political career was over. He had sufficiently recovered his political standing in the Republican Party to announce his candidacy for president. Taking a stance between the more conservative elements of his party led by Ronald Reagan and the liberal Northeastern wing led by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon won. -
Assassination of MLK
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American clergyman and civil rights leader who was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. that evening. -
Riots of Democratic convention
Other events preceding the 1968 Democratic convention contributed to the tense national mood. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out throughout the country. -
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. -
Kent State
The Kent State shootings were the shootings of unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, by members of the Ohio National Guard. Twenty-nine guardsmen fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing 4 students and wounding 9, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. -
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
On January 15, 1973, 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. Combat missions continued in South Vietnam. By January 27, 1973, all warring parties in the Vietnam War signed a ceasefire as a prelude to the Paris Peace Accord. -
Tonkin Gulf Resolution
Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing 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. -
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. -
Reagan elected
Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Before his presidency, he was the 33rd Governor of California, from 1967 to 1975, after a career as a Hollywood actor and union leader. -
SDI announced
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons. 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
For the first time in six years, on November 19, 1985, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union held a summit conference, which took place in Geneva. President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, began their talks with an hourlong exchange of views at Fleur d'Eau, a lakeside chateau owned by the Aga Khan. -
'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. -
Iron Curtain
The national barrier separating the former Soviet bloc and the West prior to the decline of communism that followed the political events in eastern Europe in 1989. -
Fall of Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
April 1954- June 1954
A series of hearings held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations. The hearings were held for the purpose of investigating conflicting accusations between the United States Army and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Army accused chief committee counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to G. David Schine, a former McCarthy aide and a friend of Cohn's.
