Cold Warrior Retirement Home 18th Anniversary Celebration: We'll wrap up our look at the Cold War with a version of our round-table discussions today.
Here are the guests:
China
- Mao Zedong
- Zhou Enlai
Europe
- Lech Walesa
- Vaclav Havel
- Margaret Thatcher
- Erich Honecker
- Willy Brandt
- Konrad Adenauer
Korea
- Syngman Rhee
- Kim Il Sung
Soviet Union
- Joseph Stalin
- Nikita Khrushchev
- Andrei Gromyko
- Leonid Brezhnev
- Mikhail Gorbachev
United States
- Harry Truman
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- John Kennedy
- Lyndon Johnson
- Richard Nixon
- Henry Kissinger
- Ronald Reagan
Vietnam
- Ngo Dinh Diem
- Ho Chi Minh
You'll be expected to look into "your" role in the Cold War. We don't need to know a bunch more about other aspects of your life. Keep it simple and straight-forward. We're talking introductions of about a minute or two. Your roles were selected from the list at the Cold War International History Project's Cold War Files (a great site) page cleverly entitled, "People."
Questions for Discussion: We've already been talking about Cold War events, but I want to take a step back here and consider the broader picture. Here are a couple of questions for you:
- Was the Cold War inevitable? Why or why not?
- Where, if anywhere, do you place blame for the start of the Cold War?
- From the perspective of 1945, do you think either side conceived that this conflict would last for more than 40 years?
- From the perspective of 1945, do you think either side could realistically have predicted victory?
- What do you believe were the most important events of the Cold War? Why?
- Who was most to blame for the Cuban Missile Crisis? The United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba?
- Was the nuclear arms race inevitable? What might have been done differently?
- What brought the Cold War to an end?
- Is the United States justified in claiming to have "won" the Cold War? Why or why not?
Cold War Time Capsules - Assume that you've been put in charge of compiling a time capsule of the Cold War. It will be opened in 2041, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Cold War. You've got room for ten items. What do you put in the capsule? Why?
Cold War Photo Album - A slightly different version. You're limited to ten photographs to capture the essence of the Cold War. Which do you select? Why?
Cold War "Heroes and Villains" - Who are they? Why?
HOMEWORK for tomorrow - Tuesday, February 24th
Please start reading in Chapter 34 with Section 1, "The Indian Subcontinent Achieves Freedom" (pp. 997-1003). The quiz will be true/false. CONGRATULATIONS! When was the last time you read one thousand pages in a book???
