❄️ The Cold War and Decolonization 🌎 🌍 🌏 | AP Modern World History 2nd session Today, 10:00 PM It's a cool October night at the Air Defense Sector Direction Center in Duluth, MN, but internationally, it is nothing but cool. America and the Soviet Union have been butting heads the hardest they ever have, in Cuba and Turkey, playing with NUKES.
A guard there notices a figure, climbing the security fence, and activates the alarm. The alarm rings across many near bases, and in one, sounds the klaxon, an alarm meant to signify a nuclear attack. The air base scrambles NUCLEAR-armed F-106A interceptors, ready to begin a long winter. At the last minute, the base commander finds the mistake, and stops the planes from taking off. The intruder turns out to be a bear.
But, how did we get to this point, and how are we still here? This course will cover the intense details of the Cold War, from the mighty alliance that beat the Nazis, to the Berlin Wall and finally, the collapse of a once-superpower.
Course Details:
The course will begin with a focus on the post-WWI order, the Great Depressions's global impact, the dissection of the ideologies of socialism/communism, fascism and capitalism and the geopolitical tensions leading into WWII.
Then, it will go over WWII and Allied cooperation as well as times of distrust, such as the Manhattan Project and the Soviet nuclear program, the formation of the USA and USSR as superpowers, the Allied occupation of Germany, the Marshall Plan and NATO, as well as its counterparts, COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
It will cover the formation of socialist republics in Eastern Europe, Communist victories in Asia, the Tito-Stalin split and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as early proxy wars like in Greece and Iran.
It will cover the independences of Pakistan and India and subsequent conflicts, as well as in Israel-Palestine, China's civil war, the Korean War and African independence movements (Angola, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Libya, Algeria), and the Vietnam War, a proxy war between the US and USSR.
It will cover the birth and consolidation of new countries, Ghana, Nigeria..., covering governance challenges, constitutions, borders and ideological alignments.
It will cover the Soviet-American détente and then its end, the Soviet-Afghan War and the U.S. funding of the Mujahideen. It will cover Glasnost and Perestroika, the rise of neoconservatism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR and the subsequent economic crisis. It will also cover the the Gulf War.
Throughout, we will cover connections and causation, such as the Sputnik and the Moon Landing, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the Sino-Soviet split, the détente and the Helsinki Accords and more. We will also cover the AP themes and how they correlate with each topic throughout. We will get SAQ practice done and a final LEQ for practice, where we will cover writing techniques.
