[the Story of the World] Ch.38

Ch.38 Two Ways of Fighting

Soviet Invasions

- The Soviet Union had not given up its hopes of spreading communism around more of the world. By 1968, Russia had drawn the small countries all around its western border into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. Soviet soldiers had invaded Poland and Hungary and added those countries to the Soviet Empire as well.
- In August 20th, 1968, Czechoslovakia was invaded.
- In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan. into Afghanistan. But Afghanistan wasn‘t an easy country to conquer. The Mujaheddin knew how to stage guerrilla warfare, attacking from the rough wild mountains of their country and then disappearing again. Instead of making Afghanistan part of the Soviet Union, the USSR had to treat it as an occupied country, filled with hostile rebels.


Terrorism

- There were eight Black September terrorists in the Munich Olympic Village. They threatened to kill their nine Israeli hostages unless two hundred Arab guerrilla fighters, taken prisoner by the Israeli army, were released from Israeli prison.
- The most well-known terrorist groups in the world came from the Middle East. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in the Arab state of Jordan. At first, the PLO was a political organization. It wanted to form a new homeland for the Palestinian Arabs who had been forced to leave their homes in Palestine when their land was claimed by Israel.
- Another group that gave birth to terrorism was the IRA-the Irish Republican Army. When most of Ireland was made into the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland remained part of the British Empire.
- Invasion of another country begins one kind of war. After invasions, armies and leaders clash with each other, trying to decide who will finally have power. But terrorism is another kind of war - one that changes forever the lives of those who have nothing to do with politics.

[the Story of the World] Ch.37

Ch.37 Two Short Wars and One Long One

The Vietnam War

- In 1959, Ho Chi Minh ordered the Viet Minh to begin a guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese government. He intended for this guerrilla war to go on until South Vietnam surrendered to the north.
- This was the beginning of the longest war the United States had ever fought. It would drag on for eight long years. In 1969, at the height of the war, over half a million American soldiers were in the tiny country of Vietnam. American soldiers fought against the Viet Cong in the south, while American fighter planes bombed North Vietnamese military bases and cities.
- By 1972, the United States had agreed to meet with the North Vietnamese to talk about peace terms. Right at the beginning of 1973, the United States signed a treaty with the Viet Cong and both Vietnamese nations.
- In 1975, the communist armies of North Vietnam invaded the south, captured the southern capital city, Saigon, and took over the South Vietnamese government. One year later, Vietnam was reunited into one country, under communist rule: the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.


Trouble in the Middle East

- In 1967, after Israel had been a country for almost twenty years, another war began. We call it the Six-Day War. It lasted for six days.
- At the end of the war, Israel took land away from all three of the defeated countries. These territories-the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights quadrupled Israel‘s size.
- This third war between Israel and her Arab neighbors is called the Yom Kippur War, because Egypt and Syria launched their attack on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
- OPEC’s oil embargo against the United States
- Five years after the Yom Kippur War and the embargo, the new president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, helped to bring a measure of peace between Egypt and Israel.
- In 1978, Begin (the Prime Minister of Israel) and Sadat (the president of Egypt) won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work at Camp David. But not everyone was thrilled.
Many Arab leaders were outraged because Sadat had signed a treaty with Israel- which meant that he was recognizing Israel‘s right to claim part of Palestine.

[the Story of the World] Ch.36

Ch.36 Struggles and Assassinations

The Death of John F. Kennedy

- At 12:30 p.m., the president‘s car passed a tall building called the Texas School Book Depository. Shots rang out. President Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head. Governor Connally was shot in the back.
- The driver sped away, towards a nearby hospital. But it was too late. When the car arrived at Parkland Hospital, Governor Connally was still alive, but the president of the United Stales was dead.
- But in the 1950s, there were plenty of worries under the surface. The Cold War had grown more frightening. Immigrants who came to America from other countries often lived in poverty, surrounded by dirt and disease. Especially in the South, African-Americans were denied the right to live peace-fully, to vote, and to do all of the things that white Americans took for granted.
- These problems had been there all along but after Kennedy‘s assassination, they seemed to rise to the surface. They became easier to see. Life in America seemed a little less glittering and a little less wonderful. Americans were forced to face up to the troubles in their own country.


Civil Rights

- The segregation laws of the American South were nicknamed ˝Tim Crow laws.˝ They took this name from an old, nineteenth-century song called “Jump Jim Crow”.
- It took years for the schools of America to become fully integrated. The courage of boys and girls like Elizabeth Eckford, and of men and women like Rosa Parks and Martin Lucher King, Jr., helped to bring about full civil rights for American blacks. The civil rights movement was also helped by the power of the United States government, which often told the states that they had no choice but to follow the orders of the Supreme Court-or else.
- In 1964, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law said that restaurants and other establishments would no longer be allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin color. They would have to serve both whites and blacks. There would be no more separation. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed black people the right to vote.
- Three years afterwards, on April 4th, 1968, the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was staying in a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was preparing to lead a march char aimed to help local black workers get better pay. As he stood on the balcony ofhis hotel room, an assassin shot him. He was rushed to the hospital, but he died an hour later.

[the Story of the World] Ch.35

Ch.35 The Cold War

The Space Race

- On the night of October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union had just launched a satellite, called Sputnik, into space. Sputnik (a Russian word that means “fellow traveler” or “companion” would circle around the Earth once every hour and a half, beeping constantly and sending radio waves back to Earth. It was the first man-made satellite to ever be launched into space, and the first to orbit (circle) around the Earth.
- A month later, the Soviets launched a second satellite into Orbit. This time the satellite, Sputnik II, had a passenger, a dog named Laika.
- On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in a rocket called Vostok 1. His flight lasted 108 minutes.
- On July 16th, 1969, the Apollo 11 spaceship was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida-NASA‘s headquarters. The Apollo 11 mission had one goal: Land on the moon, step out, and then come back.
- Four days later, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed into a smaller vehicle called the Eagle. It was designed to separate from Apollo 11 and land on the moon.
- Americans across the country watched them on television as they descended the ladder, down to the surface of the moon Neil Armstrong was the first astronaut to put his foot on the mooris surface. As he took his first step, he said, ˝That‘s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.˝


Thirteen Days in October

- For thirteen days, the Soviet Union and the United States were at a stand-off over the missiles. Nuclear war seemed inevitable. This was what the whole world had dreaded ever since the first atomic bomb had exploded over Hiroshima. Nuclear weapons were so powerful, and so deadly, that if the United States and the Soviet Union attacked each other, the entire world could be poisoned and destroyed.
- The “Cuban Missile Crisis” was over, but the Cold War still raged on.

[the Story of the World] Ch.34

Ch.34 Dictators in South America and Africa

Argentina’s President and His Wife

- Juan Peron and Eva Peron
- As president, Perón went on trying to improve the lives of the poor. He also did his best to get the important businesses of Argentina back under Argentinian control. Like China, Argentina was filled with foreign businessmen who controlled factories, trains, and ports. Great Britain owned most of the railroads. The United States owned almost all of the car factories. Peron brought these businesses back to the people of Argentina -by seizing them in the name of the government.
- Although Perón worked for the people of Argentina, he also used the methods of the Fascists to make sure that he kept his power.
- In 1952, Evita died. She was only thirty-three years old. At her funeral, thousands of Argentinians lined the streets and wept out loud as her coffin was carried past.
- After Eva died, Juan Perón grew more cruel. More and more Argentinians ˝disappeared˝ and were never seen again.
- Perón left his country and went first to Paraguay and then to Madrid, in Spain. Back in Argentina, his own people knocked his statues over and smashed them, and chipped his name out of all of the engravings in public squares.
- Over the next eighteen years, Argentina had nine different leaders. In 1973, eighteen years after his fight, Juan Perón even returned to Argentina and became president again-for asingle year. Then, at the age of seventy-nine, Juan Peron died.


Freedom in the Belgian Congo

- In 1958, Lumumba formed a group called the MNC or the ˝Mouvement National Congolais.˝ Lumumba told his followers, ˝Independence isn‘t a gift that can be given by Bet glum. It is the right of the Congolese people.˝
- When the Belgian government realized that the Congo was out of control, it agreed to give the Congo its independence. In 1960, the first Congolese election was held. It had been arranged so quickly that the people of the Congo hadn‘t been able to form political parties, or find out much about different candidates.
- Patrice Lumumba, the most well-known Congolese leader, was elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo.
- After Civil War, a Congolese general named Joseph Mobutu announced that the Congo would now be ruled by a ˝caretaker government˝ in other words, by military officers who had seized control of the country. (No one tried to organize another election.) Four years later, Mobutu gave himself the title ˝president.˝ (Still no election!)
- The Congo was free from European rule, but it still wasn‘t free from tyranny and corruption.