The Cold War to the Modern Era

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union became rivals in the Cold War, a decades-long standoff between two ways of running a country: democracy and capitalism versus communism. It was "cold" because the two giants never fought each other directly, but it shaped the whole world.

Cold War overview

• ●An arms race built huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons
• ●The Space Race: the U.S. landed astronauts on the Moon in 1969
• ●Proxy wars, like the Korean War and Vietnam War, were fought instead of direct combat
• ●The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) brought the world close to nuclear war

Major shifts

• ●The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) symbolized the end of the divide
• ●The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, ending the Cold War
• ●The U.S. became the world's leading superpower

Connecting to today

• ●The Sept 11, 2001 attacks reshaped American security and foreign policy
• ●The digital age and the internet changed how people work, learn, and connect
• ●Debates over rights, the economy, and America's role in the world continue