COLD WAR When World War II in Europe finally came to an end on May 7, 1945, a new war was just beginning. The Cold War: denoting the open yet restricted rivalry that developed between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, a war fought on political, economic, and propag...

Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy's greatest triumph as President of the United States came in 1962, as the world's two largest superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, edged closer and closer to nuclear war. The Soviet premier of Russia was caught arming Fidel Castro with nu...

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR II Even while World War II war still being fought, leaders of the Allied powers began thinking about how to reconstruct Europe after the war. Winston Churchill of Britain, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union a...

Joseph Stalin led the Socialist Soviet Union in the "Revolution from Above," a movement to centralize the government and transform society without popular participation. Because Stalin's radical goals were destructive for the populace to attain, his legitimacy was based on the credibility of his ...

The Soviet totalitarian regime held the many nations of the USSR together for almost three quarters of a century; the disintegration of this political system brought with it economic and political instability as well as civil wars in the separated states. Why did the collapse of the communist regim...

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg The outcome of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial for espionage in 1951 and their subsequent execution in 1953 was directly related to the political climate at that time. The government's evidence against the Rosenbergs was not overwhelming, but due to a...

Introduction On the morning of Tuesday October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was reading the Tuesday morning newspapers in his bed at the Whitehouse. Not twenty fours hours before, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, received the results of Major Richard S. H...

Preface: How has the ninth edition been updated? In this updated edition, certain chapters have in added in light of the attacks of September 11, 2001. There was a chapter added on the foreign policies of Clinton and Yelstin-Putin also, an introduction to the beginnings of George W. Bush's...

Ideological differences between Liberalism in England and Leninism in the Soviet Union place the two nations at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The former advocates for the importance of individualism and the ability of the market to regulate itself, whereas the latter prioritizes the stat...