| Glossary Term | Definition |
| Cold War | The period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies from the mid 1940s until the early 1990s. |
| “baby boom” | A period of greatly increased birth rate within temporal and usually geographical bounds. |
| buffer zone | Demilitarized zones and certain restrictive easement zones and greenbelts. set up to prevent violence, protect the environment, protect residential and commercial zones from industrial accidents or natural disasters. |
| satellite countries | A country which is formally independent but which is primarily subject to the domination of another, larger power. Initially used to refer to Central and Eastern European countries of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. |
| Truman Doctrine | A United States foreign policy designed to contain Communism by stopping its spread to Greece and Turkey. The United States proclaimed the this on March 12, 1947. |
| Marshall Plan | European Recovery Program (ERP). The primary plan of the United States for rebuilding the allied countries of Europe and repelling communism after World War II. |
| Tito | The leader of Yugoslavia between the end of World War II and his death in 1980. |
| Berlin Blockade | One of the first major crises of the new Cold War. The Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. |
| Berlin Airlift, 1948-49 | A massive operation using both civil and military aircraft (ultimately lasting 462 days) that flew supplies into the Western-held sectors of Berlin over the blockade. Lt. General William H. Tunner was in charge. |
| NATO | An international organization for collective security established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty. |
| Warsaw Pact | An organization of Central and Eastern European communist states, established on May 1, 1955 in Warsaw, Poland to counter the alleged threat from the NATO alliance. |
| Nuremberg Trials | A series of trials most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. |
| Konrad Adenauer | A conservative German statesman most noted for his role as Chancellor of West Germany from 1949–1963 and chairman of the Christian Democratic Union from 1950 to 1966. |
| 1949 Communist Revolution in China | A conflict in China between the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party. |
| Mao Zedong | A Chinese Marxist military and political leader and writer, who led the Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War. Led the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. |
| Joseph McCarthy | A Republican U.S. Senator, noted for aggressively investigating claims that there were Communist and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government. |
| European Coal and Steel Community | Was founded in 1951 (Treaty of Paris), by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to pool the steel and coal resources of its member-states. |
| Treaty of Rome, 1957 | Established the European Economic Community. Signed by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg |
| European Economic Community EEC | An organization established by the Treaty of Rome between the ECSC countries Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, known informally as the Common Market. |
| Common Market | A customs union with common policies on product regulation, and freedom of movement of all the four factors of production. |
| COMECON | An economic organization of communist states, an Eastern Bloc equivalent to—but more inclusive than—the European Economic Community. |
| Nikita Khruschev | The leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin. First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. |
| “cult of personality” | A political institution in which a country’s leader uses mass media to create a larger-than-life public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. |
| Hungary Revolution of 1956 | A spontaneous nationwide revolt against the Communist government of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from October 23 until November 10, 1956. |
| Sputnik | The first artificial satellite, launched on October 4, 1957 by the Soviet Nation. |
| Yuri Gagarin | A Soviet cosmonaut. the first human in space and the first human to orbit the Earth. |
| NASA | An agency of the United States Government, responsible for the nation's public space program. Established on July 29, 1958. |
| “decolonization” | The achievement of independence by the various Western colonies and protectorates in Asia and Africa following World War II. |
| Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 | A war fought between two nations, for the region of Kashmir from 1947 - 1948. |
| Korean War 1950-53 | A civil war between the states of North Korea and South Korea that were created out of the post-World War II Soviet and American occupation zones in Korea. |
| French Indo-China | A federation of protectorates and one directly ruled colony in Southeast Asia, part of the French colonial empire. It consisted of Cochin China, Tonkin, Annam, Laos, and Cambodia. |
| Dien Bien Phu, 1954 | A Vietnamese town known for its opium traffic. The region was fortified in November 1953 by the French Union force in the biggest airborne operation of the 1946-1954 First Indochina War, Operation Castor. |
| The Geneva Convention, 1954 | Consist of four treaties formulated in Geneva, Switzerland, that set the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. |
| Creation of Israel, 1948 | The first in a series of armed conflicts fought between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. |
| Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser | The President of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Well-known for his Arab nationalist and anti-colonial foreign policy. |
| Suez Crisis 1956 | A war fought on Egyptian territory in 1956. The conflict pitted Egypt against Israel, the United Kingdom and France. |
| UN peace keepers | Persons who monitor and observe peace processes in post-conflict areas and assist ex-combatants in implementing the peace agreements they may have signed. |
| Simone de Beauvoir | A French author and philosopher, best known for metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. |
| Frantz Fanon | A Martinique-born French author and essayist. A preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization |
| NAACP | One of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States. |
| Martin Luther King Jr. | A famous leader of the American civil rights movement, a political activist, and a Baptist minister. Assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. |
| Elvis Presley | "The King of Rock 'n' Roll." An American singer, musician and actor. |
| James Dean | An American film actor, a cultural icon, best embodied in the title of his most cited role in Rebel Without a Cause. |
| Marlon Brando | An Oscar-winning American actor, who starred in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Was Vito Corleone in the 1972 film The Godfather. |
| Playboy | An American adult entertainment magazine, founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates |
| Christian Dior | An influential French fashion designer |
| Voice of America | the official international radio and television broadcasting service of the United States federal government. |
| Ray Bradbury | An American literary, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer best known for The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 |
| Jackson Pollock | An influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. |
| Roberto Rossellini | One of the most important directors of Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement. |
| Vittorio De Sica | An actor, later on, owned a company. Wrote some of the most celebrated films of the neorealistic age, like Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette with Cesare Zavattini, as well as La Ciociara. |
| John Fitzgerald Kennedy | 35th President of the United States, served from 1961 to his assassination in 1963. |
| Fidel Castro | the current President of Cuba, led the revolution overthrowing Fulgencio Batista in 1959. |
| CIA | An intelligence agency of the United States Government. Its primary function is obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons. |
| Bay of Pigs | An unsuccessful United States-planned and funded attempted invasion to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba. |
| Cuban Missile Crisis | A confrontation during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States regarding the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. |
| Fourth Republic of France | The republican government of France between 1946 and 1958, governed by the fourth republican constitution. |
| Christian Democrats | Political persons who are conservative in regard to moral and cultural issues. |
| Economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) | The upturn experienced in the West German and Austrian economies after the Second World War. |
| Existentialism | A philosophical movement that deals with human freedom. A revolt against traditional philosophy. 'What is the nature of human freedom?' |
| Thaw | The period in Soviet history between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repression and censorship reached a low point. |
| Third world | The developing world. The countries a part of this world countries are not as industrialized or technologically advanced as developed countries. |
| United Nations | An international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress and human rights issues, founded in 1945. |
| Welfare state | An ideal model in which the state assumes primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. |
| Council for Mutual Economic Assistance | An economic organization of communist states and a kind of Eastern Bloc equivalent to—but more inclusive than—the European Economic Community. |
| Kwame Nkrumah | An anti-colonial, anti-neo-colonial, and anti-imperialist African leader from Ghana. Was the founder and first president of the modern Ghanaian state |
| Charles De Gaulle | A French military leader and statesman who advocated the concentrated use of armored and aviation forces. During World War II, he reached the rank of Brigade. |
| Albert Camus | The second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. An Algerian-French author and philosopher who wrote l'Etranger. |
| Ian Fleming | An English author and journalist, best remembered for writing the James Bond series of novels as well as the children's story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. |
| Brown v. Board of Education | A landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities. |
| Abstract expressionism | An American post-World War II art movement, the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world |
| Land Freedom Army (Mau Mau) | An insurgence army of Kenyan that rebels against the British colonial administration that lasted from 1952 to 1960. |
| Achmed Sukarno | The first President of Indonesia, helped the country win its independence from the Netherlands and was President from 1945 to 1967. |
