Unit 10 Outline

Readings:

 

Western Civilization, 5th Edition,  Jackson J. Spielvogel

 

  Chapter  28. Cold War and a New Western World, 1945-1970.
  Chapter  29. The Contemporary Western World (Since 1970).

 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Describe the factors that led to the development of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Which country was more responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War?

  2. Describe the circumstances and events that led to (a) the Truman Doctrine and (b) the Berlin Airlift.

  3. Describe the European political atmosphere in the early postwar years.  How did it seem to change?

  4. Between the mid-1950’s and the mid-1970’s, the United States and the Soviets oscillated between dangerous confrontation and a marked lessening of tension, or détente.  Explain the background leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the reasons for the subsequent lessening of tension.

  5. Discuss the restlessness in the Soviet Satellites in the 1950s and 1960s.  How did the Soviets react in  (a) Poland, (b) in Hungary, (c)  in Czechoslovakia?

  6. Discuss the link in Gorbachev’s program between economic reform and political liberalization.

  7. How did the relaxation of controls unleash ethnic unrest?  What did this unrest reveal about the nature of the U.S.S.R?

  8. Describe the origins, course, and outcomes of the revolutions of 1989 in (a) Poland, (b)  Hungary, (c)  the German Democratic Republic, (d) Czechoslovakia, (e) Romania, (f) Bulgaria.

  9. Describe the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  What role did Gorbachev play?  Yeltsin?

 

 

Identifications:

 

The Cold War

 

Truman Doctrine

Marshall Plan

"containment"

Berlin blockade

NATO

COMECON

Korean Wa

"massive retaliation"

CENTO and SEATO

Nikita Khrushchev

Sputnik I

Berlin Wall

Bay of Pigs

Cuban Missile Crisis

Vietnam War

domino theory

Détente

PLO and al-Fatah

Six-Day War

Indian National Congress

Mahatma Gandhi

Mao Zedong

Great Leap Forward

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Hungarian uprising

"Prague Spring"

Christian Democratic parties

Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic

Konrad Adenauer

Suez Crisis

European Coal and Steel Community

EEC/Common Market

Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan

 

 

End of the 20th Century

 

Helsinki Agreements

the "evil empire"

Strategic Defense Initiative

Mikhail Gorbachev

Gulf War

New World Order

Leonid Brezhnev

perestroika

glasnost

Commonwealth of Independent States

Boris Yeltsin

Solidarity

Lech Walesa

Pope John Paul II

Vaclav Havel

Czech Republic and Slovakia

Erich Honecker

Slobodan Milosevic

Kosovo

the EC

Helmut Kohl

Margaret Thatcher

OPEC

Ayatollah Khomeini "supply-side economics"

Pierre Trudeau

the IRA

Green parties

Abstract Expressionism

Postmodernism

Theatre of the Absurd

Waiting for Godot

Existentialism

Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre

Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and MTV

NGOs

Y2K