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Yalta Conference
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Victory in Europe Day
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Potsdam Conference
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Japanese Surrender
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"Iron Curtain" Speech
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Truman Doctrine
President Truman establishing that the US would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan successfully sparked economic recovery, restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. -
Berlin Blockade
World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control (Ended May 12, 1949) -
Airlift
Carry supplies to the people of West Berlin (End September 30, 1949) -
Comecon Created
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NATO established
An intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European states based on the North Atlantic Treaty -
China becomes Communist
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Korean War
First military action of the cold war. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself (End- July 27, 1953) -
KGB Established
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Domino Theory
prominent from the 1950s to the 1980s, that speculated that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. -
Vietnam is divided
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Warsaw Pact established
The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. -
Vietnam War
a war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to the fall of Saigon. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. (End- April 30, 1975) -
Suez Crisis
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Sputnik
First artificial Earth satellite -
Fidel Castro Takes Over Cuba
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U2 Spy Plane Shot Down
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First Man in Space (Yuri Gagarin)
Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth -
Bay of Pigs
a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group -
First American in Space (Alan Shepard)
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Berlin Wall Built
a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided 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. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. -
Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution
Resolution- August 7, 1964 -
Six-Day War
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Tet offensive
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Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon
the spaceflight that landed the first two humans on the Moon. Mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the lunar module Eagle -
Yom Kippur War
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Nicaraguan Revolution
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Iranian Hostage Crisis
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Mikhail Gorbachev takes office
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Perestroika
instituted in the Soviet Union to restructure Soviet economic and political policy. Seeking to bring the Soviet Union up to economic par with capitalist countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States -
Iran-Contra Affair
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Glasnost
Glasnost” means “openness” and was the name for the social and political reforms to bestow more rights and freedoms upon the Soviet people. -
Tiananmen Square
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Hungary becomes Independent
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Berlin Wall Falls
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. -
Communist Government in
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Poland becomes Independent
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Germany Reunites
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Warsaw Pact Ends
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Boris Yeltsin elected president of Russia
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USSR Dissolved