The Berlin Wall, its western side covered in graffiti, with East Berlin beyond
The Berlin Wall from the west
Marked Berlin

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Cold War

For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union, with their allies, competed for power without fighting each other directly, while proxy wars were fought around the world and both built nuclear arsenals.

Place
Berlin · Havana · Moscow · WashingtonThe whole world
Laid out as
A warTwo sides, a front line, and the turns the fighting took.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

The United States and its allies, including NATO

  1. IAn iron curtain
  2. IIThe Berlin airlift
  3. IIIThe bomb
  4. IVThe Cuban missile crisis
  5. VProxy wars
  6. VIThe Berlin Wall falls
  7. VIIThe Soviet Union ends

The Soviet Union and its allies, including the Warsaw Pact

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Harry Truman
  • Joseph Stalin
  • Nikita Khrushchev
  • John F. Kennedy
  • Mikhail Gorbachev
  • Ronald Reagan

Objects

  • Pieces of the Berlin Wall
  • Protect and Survive leaflets

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1947 to 1991. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?