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The United Nations is an international organization founded after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. -
the principle that the US should give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or Communist insurrection. First expressed in 1947 by US President Truman in a speech to Congress seeking aid for Greece and Turkey, the doctrine was seen by the Communists as an open declaration of the Cold War. -
Hollywood Ten, in U.S. history, 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. -
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. -
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. -
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 by troops from the Soviet Union. -
The Korean War was a war fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. -
The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, to achieve superior spaceflight capability. -
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution. -
to isolate the postwar allied western sectors of the former German capital from Soviet occupied East Berlin. The barbed wire that formed the initial barrier was swiftly covered with bricks and mortar. -
USS Maddox is allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin (the attack is later disputed), leading President Johnson to call for air strikes on North Vietnamese patrol boat bases. -
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.