The document summarizes major events in world history from 1945 to 1962 related to the end of World War 2 and rise of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union. It describes the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and USSR invading Manchuria, leading to Japan's surrender. It then outlines the political ideologies that emerged like liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism, communism and their key attributes. Major postwar conferences and the division of Germany and Korea are also summarized.

9. Aug. 1945: US used atomic bombs (A-bomb) on Japan; USSR invaded Japanese-
occupied Manchuria; Japan surrendered

18. Totalitarian Democratic Totalitarian
The Political Spectrum Post-World War I
Liberalism
• Late 1700s in
American and
French
Revolutions
• Civil liberties –
freedom of
expression
• Limited
government by
constitution
• Legal equality of
all social classes
• Benefited middle
class most
• Multi-party
democracy – US,
France, Britain
Conservatism
• Authoritarian
traditional social
order
• Dominance of
upper class social
elites – nobles,
church officials,
moneyed interests
• Maintain military
rule by kings or
dictators
• Pre-WWI:
Germany, Austria-
Hungary, Russia,
Ottoman Empire
Fascism
• 1920s
• Replace
militaristic king w/
militaristic dictator
• Totalitarian state
by one-party
dictatorship
• Ultra-nationalist
• Anti-communist
• Social Darwinian
expansion
• Italy (1922)
Nazism
• Racial superiority
• Germany (1933)
Socialism
• Mid-1800s in
Industrial
Revolution
• Legal and
economic equality
• Benefited lower
working
class/proletariat
• Government
ownership of
means of
production –
factories, mines,
power,
transportation,
communication
• Legal reform and
labor union
activism
Communism
• Mid-1800s
• Complete
economic equality
to create
classless system
• Anti-bourgeoisie
• Government
ownership of
means of
production –
factories, mines,
power,
transportation,
communication
• Totalitarian state
by one-party
dictatorship
• USSR (1917)

19. Feb. 1945: Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met at Yalta Conference in USSR to
discuss post-war plans

21. 1945: Soviets took Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Albania, and East Germany in WWII.

22. 1945-9: 15 million people fled west while USSR
plundered $14 billion of industrial materials and
established communist satellite states.

23. July 1945: Truman, Churchill/Atlee, and Stalin met in Potsdam Conference in
Germany. Truman objected to pro-Soviet governments installed in Eastern
Europe without free elections

24. Germany divided into four occupation zones; USSR occupied Eastern Europe and
East Germany

27. April 1945: first meeting of the United Nations

29. 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• All human beings are born free and equal
• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and
security; no one shall be held in slavery or
servitude or subjected to torture, arbitrary
arrest, detention or exile
• Freedom of movement, thought, conscience
and religion, opinion and expression,
peaceful assembly and association
• Right to take part in the government through
free elections by universal suffrage
• Right to an adequate standard of living and
education

34. 1948 UN Genocide Convention
Genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group by:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

36. Sept. 1945: Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam to
be an independent state; Korea divided at the
38th Parallel into an American-backed South
and Soviet-backed North

37. Feb. 1946: American diplomat in Moscow George Kennan
released the “Long Telegram” warning that the USSR
viewed peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West as
impossible

38. Mar. 1946: Churchill declared that an
“Iron Curtain” had descended across Europe

39. March 1947: Truman Doctrine gave US aid to fight communist expansion in
Greece and Turkey pursuing a policy of containment.

41. June 1948: US began Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe; Berlin Airlift
bypassed communist blockade

42. June 1948: US began Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe; Berlin Airlift
bypassed communist blockade

43. Apr. 1949: US-led NATO formed

44. Radio Free Europe broadcasted
to communist Eastern bloc.

45. tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF4LQaWJRDg

48. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Zozvmxat0

49. Sept. 1949: Soviets detonated first nuclear device

50. Nov. 1952: US tested first hydrogen bomb (H-bomb)

51. Aug. 1953: USSR tested first H-bomb

53. 39.8 miles
7.5 miles
5.5 miles
.5 miles

57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtCTzbh4mNQ

58. MAD: Mutually Assured
Destruction
New US Policy: Sec State
John Foster Dulles,
brinkmanship

61. Oct. 1949: Mao Zedong captured Beijing and established communist People’s
Republic of China

62. Feb. 1950: Red Scare in US led by Senator Joseph McCarthy

63. June 1950: Korean War began; United Nations defended South Korea from a
communist North Korean invasion led by Kim Il Sung backed by China and USSR.

64. March 1953: Stalin died; Nikita Khrushchev takes power

65. July 1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for selling atomic secrets to the
Soviet Union; Korean War ended in armistice with pre-war 38th Parallel border
restored with demilitarized zone (DMZ)

66. May 1954: French defeated by Viet Minh
at Dien Bien Phu

67. May 1955: USSR-led Warsaw Pact
formed

68. Oct. 1956: Hungary called for free elections and appealed to US for help against
USSR; Soviets crushed Hungarian Uprising while America looked on

69. Jan. 1957: Eisenhower Doctrine committed US aid to stop communist
expansion in Middle East

70. Oct. 1957: USSR launched Sputnik I

71. Jan. 1958: China began the disastrous
Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) which led
to 18-55 million dead.

72. Oct. 1958: US feared a “missile gap”; NASA formed

73. Jan. 1959: Fidel Castro led the communist
Cuban Revolution

74. July 1959: US VP Richard Nixon visited USSR and engaged Soviet premier
Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate

75. May 1960: American U-2 spy plane shot down over USSR

76. Apr. 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became first man to orbit Earth;
US CIA-backed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba failed

77. May 1961: John F. Kennedy committed US to moonshot – to put a man on the
Moon by the end of the decade

78. Aug. 1961: Berlin Wall erected to stop flood of 3.5 million refugees defecting
from the communist East to the free West

79. Sept. 1961: India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia began the
Non-Aligned Movement to preserve Cold War neutrality in the Third World

80. Feb. 1962: John Glenn became first American astronaut to orbit Earth

81. Oct. 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis; US pursued brinksmanship diplomacy and
quarantined Cuba with a naval blockade in response to placement of Soviet
nuclear missiles in Cuba. World War III was narrowly averted.