World War II pt. B vocabulary Flashcards
(47 cards)
Containment
The action of keeping something harmful under control or within limits.
Cold-War
A state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc.
Truman Doctrine
The principle that the US should give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or communist insurrection.
Marshall Plan
An American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $13 billion in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II.
NATO
An intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European states based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949.
Warsaw Pact
A collective defence treaty among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Cuneiform
Denoting or relating to the wedge-shaped characters used in the ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit, surviving mainly impressed on clay tablets.
Berlin Wall
A guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
Khrushchev
A politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War.
Mau Zedong
A Chinese communist revolutionary and founding father of the People’s Republic of China, which he governed as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949, until his death in 1976.
Cuban Missile Crisis
A 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba.
Arms Race
A competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons, especially between the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Satellite States
A political term that refers to a country or nation that was formally independent, but is now politically and economically influenced by another country.
Domino Theory
The theory that a political event in one country will cause similar events in neighboring countries, like a falling domino causing an entire row of upended dominoes to fall.
East Germany
An Eastern Bloc state during the Cold War period.
West Germany
The common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation on 23 May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990.
The People’s Republic of China
A populous nation in East Asia whose vast landscape encompasses grassland, desert, mountains, lakes, rivers and more than 14,000km of coastline.
The Great Leap Forward
An economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1962.
The Cultural Revolution
A sociopolitical movement that took place in China from 1966 until 1976.
The Gang of Four
A political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials, they came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were later charged with a series of treasonous crimes.
The Red Guards
In 1966, a group of middle school students in Beijing named themselves “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.
Bay of Pigs
A failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961.
Space Race
The 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability.
The Iron Curtain
The name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
