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Chapter 29 Vocab
Europe and North America
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Nuremberg trials | (1945-1949) trials in which an allied military tribunal tried several dozen top Nazi and military officials; many were executed for war crimes |
Cold War | an era of high tension and bitter rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades following World War II |
iron curtain | term coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe an imaginary line dividing Communist countries in the Soviet bloc from countries in Western Europe during the cold war |
Truman Doctrine | (1947) U.S. president Truman's pledge to provide economic and military aid to countries threatened by communism |
Marshall Plan | (1947) plan for the economic reconstruction of Europe after World War II |
Containment | the United States policy adopted in the 1940s to stop the spread of communism by providing economic and military aid to countries opposing the Soviets |
Berlin airlift | (1948-1949) a program in which the United States and Britain shipped supplies by air to West Berlin during the Soviet Blockade of all routes to the city |
NATO | North Atlantic Treaty Organization; a defensive military alliance of twelve Western nations formed in 1949 |
Warsaw Pact | a military alliance of the soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe established in 1955 |
hydrogen bomb | a nuclear weapon that gets its power from the fusing together of hydrogen atoms |
deterrence | the development of or maintenance of military power to deter, or prevent, an attack |
arms race | competition between nations the gain an advantage in weapons |
Sputnik | (1957) the first artificial satellite; launched by the Soviet Union |
Bay of Pigs invasion | (1961) the failed attempt of Cuban exiles backed by the U.S. to overthrow the Cuban socialist government of Fidel Castro |
Cuban missile crisis | (1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet missiles in Cuba |
nonaligned nations | nations who refused to ally with either side in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union |
detente | efforts taken by U.S. president Nixon in the late 1960's and early 1970's to lower cold war tensions |
Martin Luther King Jr. | American civil rights leader; he was a celebrated and charismatic advocate of civil rights for African Americans in the 1950's and 1960's. he was assassinated in 1968. |
counterculture | a rebellion of teens and young adults against mainstream American culture in the 1960's |
Solidarity | an independent labor union founded in Soviet controlled Poland in 1980 |
Mikhail Gorbachev | Russian politician; he was the last president of the Soviet Union before the country's collapse in 1991 |
glasnost | "openness"; refers to a new era of media freedom in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980's |
perestroika | "restructuring"; restructuring of the corrupt government bureaucracy in the Soviet Union begun by Mikhail Gorbachev |
Velvet Revolution | (1989) a quick and peaceful revolution that swept the communist from power in Czechoslovakia |
Boris Yeltsin | Russian politician and president of Russia in the 1990s; he was the first popularly elected leader of the country |
ethnic cleansing | the elimination of an ethnic group from society through killing or forced migration |
Internet | an electronic system that allows the linking of millions of individual computers around the world |
Saddam Hussein | President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003; he established a brutal dictatorship, suppressed all dissent, and led Iraq into wars with Iran and Kuwait. He was removed from power in 2003 by U.S. led forces |
Persian Gulf War | war in which U.S. led forces liberated Kuwait from Iraq |
al Qaeda | "the base"; Islamist terrorist organization responsible for the September 11th attacks |
Osama Bin Laden | Founder of al Qaeda, the terrorist network responsible for the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and other attacks |
Taliban | Islamist group that took control over much of Afghanistan in the late 1990's; were ousted by the United States invasion of 2001 |