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Kalina P

Cold War - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 0 views

www.history.com/cold-war

cold war history

shared by Kalina P on 20 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • “containment.”
  • President Harry Truman (1884-1972) agreed. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.”
  • deadly "arms race
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced
  • that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.
  • the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
  • ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards
  • attack drills in schools and other public places
  • Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
  • first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit.
  • Sputnik
  • 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army
  • Space Race was underwa
  • creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.
  • U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set food on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.
  • hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.
  • forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade
  • include anyone who worked in the federal government. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.
  • military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south
  • but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.
  • . The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World" Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the re
  • new approach to international relations.
  • Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywher
  • nstead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
  • , he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the worl
  • redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform
  • the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.
Kalina P

The Space Race - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 3 views

www.history.com/space-race

space race history

shared by Kalina P on 20 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Cold War
  • fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media.
  • Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile--seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space--made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.
  • In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon
  • In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok; they tested the craft with chimpanzees, and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin's launch. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit).
  • Later that May, President John F. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and by the end of that year, the foundations of NASA's lunar landing program--dubbed Project Apollo--were in place.
  • 500 percent
  • budget was increased
  • After landing successfully on July 20, Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon's surface; he famously called the moment "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
  • By landing on the moon, the United States effectively "won" the space race that had begun with Sputnik's launch in
  • ublic's attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. This frenzy of interest was further encouraged by the new medium of television. Astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes, a
  • Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.
  • Soyuz vehicle. When the commanders of the two crafts officially greeted each other, their "handshake in space" served to symbolize the gradual improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late Cold War-era.
Daryl Bambic

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII |... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...of-World-War-II-188843001.html

via:packrati.us anthropology russian isolation Siberia archaeology history

shared by Daryl Bambic on 28 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
  • iberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
  • summer of 1978
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement,
  • Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.'
  • omething from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:
  • Have you ever eaten bread?
  • "We are not allowed that!"
  • he daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."
  • a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century.
  • Peter was a personal enemy and "the anti-Christ in human form"—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar's campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly "chopping off the beards of Christians."
  • Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov's brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
  • our Lykovs then—Karp;
  • wife, Akulina
  • son named Savin
  • Natalia, a daughter who was only 2.
  • wo more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—
  • d neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their famil
  • new there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother's Bible stories. "Look, papa," she exclaimed. "A steed!"
  • e traversed 250 kilometres [155 miles] without seeing a single human dwelling!"
  • They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
  • pinning wheel a
  • A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark.
  • heir staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds.
  • bundance
  • stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.... Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof."
  • rmanently on the edge of famine.
  • not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion
  • Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites.
  • "What amazed him most of all," Peskov recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!
  • Agafia's unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time. 
  • mitry, a
  • urious and perhaps the most forward-looking member of the family
  • Perhaps it was no surprise that he was also the most enraptured by the scientists' technology.
  • many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood.
  • Karp Lykov fought a long and losing battle with himself to keep all this modernity at bay. When they first got to know the geologists, the family would accept only a single gift—salt
  • hey took knives, forks, handles, grain and eventually even pen and paper and an electric torch.
  • but the sin of television, which they encountered at the geologists' camp, proved irresistible for them.... On their rare appearances, they would invariably sit down and watch. Karp sat directly in front of the screen. Agafia watched poking her head from behind a door. She tried to pray away her transgression immediately—whispering, crossing herself.... The old man prayed afterward, diligently and in one fell swoop.
  • he Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.
  • Daryl Bambic on 28 Mar 13
     
    An amazing story of a Russian Orthodox family who ran from Soviet persecution in the 1930 and survived in the wilderness of Siberia. The children had never seen other humans, developed their own dialect and lived on the perpetual edge of the world.  Several family members were enthralled with technology, others were fearful but all were exceptionally intelligent.
tdowd t

How Feudalism Works - 0 views

www.gohistorygo.com

Middle ages manors

shared by tdowd t on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Mind Your Manors   In the days of decentralized government, a fief was like its own mini country that produced pretty much everything that was needed from food to weapons to tools. At the heart of a lord's fief was the manor-large estates. The manor was where the lord's family, servants, and his knights lived. At first they began as large houses, but over the years became full castles as walls, towers, and moats were added for protection. Manors were always in the country and surrounded by farmland and woods. Some of the wealthier lords even had more than one manor.   A manor was the center of the community. Not only did it serve as a place for peasants to run to in times of war, but was the political center as well. When he wasn't out fighting for his Lord, the lord of a fief would act as a judge in settling disputes. He also appointed officials who would collect taxes and rent from the peasants and townspeople. Large manors had their own churches complete with their own clergy, as well as a marketplace where locals could buy and sell goods. At any time one time, hundreds of people from priests, knights, squires, entertainers, merchants, peasants, and visiting nobles would head to the manor.   For the Lady of the manor her day was spent overseeing servants & caring for the children. When her husband was away (or killed in battle) the Lady of the manor assumed the same roles her husband did, appointing officials and acting as judge. In the early Middle Ages a woman owning property was not all that uncommon.
  • Living in a castle might sound romantic but it's not all that it was cracked up to be. Medieval manors were built of wood and stone and built on a large scale. Glass was rare and extremely expensive so windows often were either left open or covered with cloth during the winter. The only means of heating a manor was the fireplace. Each major room had its own. The Great Room, which as its name implies was the center of manor life.  The Great Room was heated and lit by an enormous fireplace, big enough to stand in. The Great Room was where all of the eating, drinking, debating, politicking, and merry making and other business was conducted. Speaking of doing business, how did medieval people use the bathroom? All manor houses had privies either outside or inside the castle. The ones inside were nothing more than a seat that emptied directly into the moat. ​ To modern observers manors would have been filthy places. Fleas were common and the smell of hundreds of unwashed people (who often only bathed once a week) would have pervaded. Rats and mice also would have been running around as food was thrown directly on the floor during meal times. At night the servants swept the floor and rushes (dried river reeds) would be spread on the floor and all minor visitors and knights would bed down. The manor was often dark, cold, and smoky. To liven things up a bit, tapestries would be commissioned to decorate the walls.
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