Unit 8: Cold War and Decolonization (1900-present)

Unit 8 follows two big stories after World War II. The Cold War pitted the U.S. and its capitalist allies against the Soviet Union and the communist bloc: containment, NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, the nuclear arms race, proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Communism also spread through revolutions in China and elsewhere. At the same time, colonies across Asia and Africa won independence, some through negotiation (India, Ghana) and some through armed struggle (Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya), and then faced the challenge of building new states. Study resistance movements like the civil rights movement and the end of apartheid, and how the Cold War ended in 1991.