Q4 - Lesson #24 - The Origins of the Cold War

We'll talk briefly about your work from yesterday, and then we'll jump into the Cold War.

I've got a "The Beginning of the Cold War" DBQ activity that should help give you the "big picture" of the Cold War. It's got useful background information and will serve as a valuable starting point.

CNN - Cold War: First, you're going to draw to select an episode of the highly regarded CNN - Cold War series to watch online. We'll do the drawing today. It's nothing major, but you'll basically be asked to post a brief summary and respond to a couple of questions. Here are the various episode titles and links to them. (My plan is that we'll go over the first half of these on Monday.)

1. Comrades 
2. Iron Curtain 
3. Marshall Plan 
4. Berlin 
5. Korea
6. Reds 
7. After Stalin 
8. Sputnik 
9. The Wall 
10. Cuba 
11. Vietnam 
12. MAD 
13. Make Love, Not War 
14. Red Spring 
15. China 
16. Détente 
17. Good Guys, Bad Guys 
18. Backyard 
19. Freeze 
20. Soldiers of God 
21. Spies 
22. Star Wars 
23. The Wall Comes Down 
24. Conclusions 

When you have finished summarizing, please post your blog entry on the CNN: Cold War Reports blog entry listed above. It should contain the following.

  1. Provide the title of your episode, along with a several sentence summary of what it was about.
  2. Identify and key terms or people about which people should know.
  3. List the three main conclusions/points/ideas that people should take away from this episode. (We'll share these verbally in class as well.)
  4. Your reaction to the events you saw. Were there particular people or nations who acted in ways you found praiseworthy, dangerous, etc.?
  5. Your recommendation as to whether this is a worthwhile episode for others to watch.

Cold Warriors - Pick One: Here's your chance to take on the persona of your favorite "Cold Warrior." Thursday, we will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the End of the Cold War at the Cold Warrior Retirement Home. (1991 is generally considered to mark the end of the Cold War.) You will select from the list of participants below. 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. Following that, there will be some questions for the group to discuss.

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." I'd recommend starting your research there.

China

  • Mao Zedong
  • Zhou Enlai - NOT this quarter

Europe

  • Lech Walesa
  • Vaclav Havel - NOT this quarter
  • Margaret Thatcher
  • Erich Honecker
  • Willy Brandt
  • Konrad Adenauer - NOT this quarter

Korea

  • Syngman Rhee
  • Kim Il Sung

Soviet Union

  • Joseph Stalin
  • Nikita Khrushchev
  • Andrei Gromyko - NOT this quarter
  • Leonid Brezhnev
  • Mikhail Gorbachev

United States

  • Harry Truman
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • John Kennedy
  • Lyndon Johnson
  • Richard Nixon
  • Henry Kissinger - NOT this quarter
  • Ronald Reagan

Vietnam

  • Ngo Dinh Diem
  • Ho Chi Minh
Cuba

  • Fidel Castro

HOMEWORK for tomorrow - Friday, May 13th

Please continue reading in Chapter 33 with Section 3. The quiz will be matching.

"Your" episode of the CNN: Cold War series should be watched by Monday. (Realistically, we won't get to all of them that day, but we'll do as many as we can. We will go in order.)

Our 19th Anniversary of the End of the Cold War round-table discussion will take place next Thursday.

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Mike Vergin published on May 12, 2011 8:00 AM.

Q4 - Lesson #23 - From World War to Cold War was the previous entry in this blog.

CNN: Cold War "Reports" - Quarter 4 - 2011 is the next entry in this blog.

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