Show:
COLD WAR BASICS
PROXY FIGHTS
RED CHINA & CUBA
BREAKING FREE
RESISTANCE & COLLAPSE
100
Rivalry between capitalist and communist blocs that never became direct war between them.
What is the Cold War? — MC TIP: Never direct. That is why proxy wars matter so much.
100
1950 to 1953 proxy war that left a peninsula divided.
What is the Korean War? — MC TIP: Still technically an armistice, not a peace treaty.
100
1949 revolution that brought communism to the world's most populous country.
What is the Chinese Communist Revolution? — MC TIP: Mao wins a civil war. Peasant-based, not urban.
100
Leader of India's nonviolent independence movement.
Who is Mohandas Gandhi? — MC TIP: Civil disobedience as method. His example spreads worldwide.
100
South African system of legal racial segregation.
What is apartheid? — MC TIP: Legal, not merely customary. That distinction matters.
200
United States policy of stopping the spread of communism.
What is containment? — MC TIP: It explains Korea, Vietnam, and most American foreign policy for forty years.
200
1962 crisis over Soviet missiles placed ninety miles from Florida.
What is the Cuban Missile Crisis? — MC TIP: The closest the Cold War came to going hot.
200
Mao's campaign to industrialize rapidly that instead caused mass famine.
What is the Great Leap Forward? — MC TIP: Tens of millions dead. Forced collectivization plus falsified reports.
200
1947 division of British India into two states along religious lines.
What is Partition? — MC TIP: Massive violence and displacement. The cost of drawing borders by religion.
200
Anti-apartheid leader imprisoned twenty-seven years who became president in 1994.
Who is Nelson Mandela? — MC TIP: International boycotts plus internal resistance brought the system down.
300
Western military alliance formed in 1949.
What is NATO? — MC TIP: The Warsaw Pact is the Soviet answer in 1955.
300
Conflict where superpowers back opposing sides rather than fighting each other directly.
What is a proxy war? — MC TIP: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua. Have examples ready.
300
Mao's campaign that purged intellectuals and attacked traditional culture.
What is the Cultural Revolution? — MC TIP: Ideology over expertise. It set China back a generation.
300
Leader who brought Ghana to independence, the first in sub-Saharan Africa.
Who is Kwame Nkrumah? — MC TIP: 1957. Ghana opens the wave across Africa.
300
Gorbachev's policy of economic restructuring in the Soviet Union.
What is perestroika? — MC TIP: Paired with glasnost, openness. Together they loosened the lid.
400
American aid program that rebuilt Western Europe after 1945.
What is the Marshall Plan? — MC TIP: Economic aid as containment. Prosperity makes communism less appealing.
400
Movement of states that refused to align with either superpower.
What is the Non-Aligned Movement? — MC TIP: India, Egypt, Indonesia, Yugoslavia. A third path, and it gets tested.
400
1959 revolution that brought a communist state into the Caribbean.
What is the Cuban Revolution? — MC TIP: Castro. It leads straight to the missile crisis.
400
Egyptian leader who nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956.
Who is Gamal Abdel Nasser? — MC TIP: Non-alignment and Arab nationalism in one move.
400
Barrier whose fall in 1989 symbolized the end of a divided Europe.
What is the Berlin Wall? — MC TIP: The USSR itself dissolves two years later, in 1991.
500
Doctrine that both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other, deterring direct war.
What is mutually assured destruction? — MC TIP: It explains why the Cold War stayed cold. Name it on causation questions.
500
1979 Soviet invasion that became a costly decade-long quagmire.
What is Afghanistan? — MC TIP: It drains the Soviet economy and contributes directly to collapse.
500
Leader who opened China to market reforms after Mao while keeping one-party rule.
Who is Deng Xiaoping? — MC TIP: Economic liberalization without political liberalization. A crucial distinction.
500
Eight-year war of independence against France that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
What is the Algerian War? — MC TIP: Not all decolonization was negotiated. Algeria and Vietnam were brutal.
500
Polish labor movement that challenged communist rule through strikes in the 1980s.
What is Solidarity? — MC TIP: Worker resistance inside a workers' state. The irony is the point.