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This set contains eight written sources to compare the revolutions in North America, France, Haiti, and Latin America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Tensions between the East and West started long before the Berlin Blockade in 1947. The conflict can be traced to the earliest days of the Soviet Empire and Woodrow Wilson’s administration in the US. Although they were wartime Allies, the American and Soviet experiences in WWII were significantly different. These differences greatly impacted their visions for a post-war world.

The Cold War that spanned more than four decades touched nearly every country on earth. The ideological, diplomatic, military, and cultural struggle that started between the Soviet Union and United States went through a number of phases as people and countries in the post-World War II era struggled to define what freedom would mean for them. This unit of study contains two strands – one for world history students and one for U.S. history students.

The Cold War that spanned more than four decades touched nearly every country on earth. The ideological, diplomatic, military, and cultural struggle that started between the Soviet Union and United States went through a number of phases as people and countries in the post-World War II era struggled to define what freedom would mean for them. This unit of study contains two strands – one for world history students and one for U.S. history students.

Previously in this unit students learned that the Three Worlds promoted competing social, economic and political ideals. In this lesson, students evaluate regional crises or hotspots in the US, USSR, and China as evidence of how the superpowers contradicted the principles they championed.

In this lesson students continue their studies about the relationship between Cold War principles and practices through individual, group, and guided research. This lesson is a newspaper research project in which students will produce a newspaper about a hotspot in the Cold War, in other words, a specific site where the conflict between the Americans and Soviets played out on the ground –and through the interests –of a third nation. Students will create a new paper that represents either the Soviet, American, or non-aligned country’s point of view.

“Comfort Women” is a euphemism that describes women who were forced into sexual service by the Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during the war. Comfort Women can be taught as an example of institutionalized sexual slavery; estimates on the total number of Comfort Women vary, but most argue that hundreds of thousands of women were forced into these situations during Japanese occupation. On December 28, 2015, the governments of Japan and the Republic of Korea entered into an agreement regarding the issues of Comfort Women.

This lesson focuses on a second great historical movement in the post-World War II era: decolonization. The Cold War did not cause the end of the colonial empires, but new nations became entangled in the dispute between East and West. The Cold War and decolonization created a Three World order. The First World was the US and its liberal democratic, capitalist allies, the Second World was the USSR and its communist allies, and the new, decolonized nations formed the Third World, a problematic term that students will scrutinize.

With the collapse of the capitalist market system that caused the Great Depression, political alternatives to liberal democracies emerged, particularly communism and fascism. Through the use of graphic organizers, debates, and position papers, students may compare and contrast how these communist and fascist governments responded to the collapse of the capitalist system during the Great Depression. With a side-by-side comparison of these political alternatives, students can provide an answer to the following question: Why did communism and fascism appeal to Europeans in the 1930s?

The leaders of the victorious countries drafted the treaty, which required the losing powers, particularly Germany, to assume responsibility for starting the war, and for paying the victors reparations with large amounts of currency and land. New states were created in Eastern Europe, carved from the territories of the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. The Treaty of Versailles also established the mandate system, which granted many of the Allied Powers, including Japan, administrative governance over former territories and colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire.