| A | B |
|---|
| Superpowers | nations strong enough to influence the acts and policies of other nations. |
| Anti-Ballistic Missiles | missiles that can shoot down other missiles from hostile countries. |
| Ronald Reagan | U.S. president, 1980-1988; launched "Star Wars" missile defense program. |
| Détente | easing of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. |
| Fidel Castro | Cuban dictator; only major non-elected ruler in Latin America in the 1990s; imposed harsh authoritarian rule but also improved conditions for the poor. |
| John F. Kennedy | U.S. President, 1960-1963; supported the Bay of Pigs invasion; faced down the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| Ideology | system of thought and belief. |
| Nikita Khrushchev | leader of the Soviet Union following Stalin. Denounced Stalin's abuse of power. |
| Leonid Brezhnev | Soviet leader; suppressed dissidents with arrest and imprisonment. |
| Containment | U.S. foreign policy to prevent the spread of communism beyond its existing boundaries. |
| Recession | period during which the economy shrinks. |
| Suburbanization | movement to communities outside an urban core. |
| Segregation | forced separation. |
| Discrimination | unequal treatment or barriers. |
| Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | leader of U.S. civil rights movement. |
| Konrad Adenauer | West Germany's chancellor; guided the rebuilding of cities, factories, and trade; helped create a strong industrial economy. |
| Welfare State | system in which the government takes responsibility for its citizens' social and economic needs. |
| European Community | originally known as the European Economic Community (EEC); organization dedicated to establishing free trade for all products among member nations. |
| Gross Domestic Product | total value of all goods and services produced by a nation. |
| Collectivism | pooling of land and labor in an attempt to increase efficiency. |
| Great Leap Forward | Mao Zedong's 1958-1960 program to increase China's farm and industrial output; proved to be a failure; famine killed an estimated 55 million Chinese. |
| Cultural Revolution | officially, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; Mao Zedong's program to purge China of "bourgeois" tendencies and to encourage young Chinese to experience revolution firsthand. |
| 38th Parallel | border between North and South Korea. |
| Kim Il Sung | leader in North Korea; farms and industries increased output; kept North Korea isolated with self-reliance program. |
| Syngman Rhee | U.S.-backed dictator of South Korea. |
| Pusan Perimeter | where the U.N. stopped the North Korean advance in 1950 outside the South Korean port city of Pusan. |
| Demilitarized Zone | an area with no military forces. |
| Guerrillas | small groups of loosely organized soldiers making surprise raids. |
| Ho Chi Minh | Vietnamese nationalist and communist; fought for Vietnam's independence from France; determined to unite Vietnam under communist rule. |
| Dienbienphu | French defeat the led to France's withdrawal from Indochina and to independence for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. |
| Domino Theory | belief that if one nation falls to communism, neighboring nations would also fall, like a row of falling dominos. |
| Viet Cong | Vietnamese National Liberation Front; communist rebels trying to overthrow South Vietnam's government. |
| Tet Offensive | communist attack on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces on the Vietnamese New Year, 1968; turning point in U.S. public opinion regarding the Vietnam War. |
| Khmer Rouge | Cambodian communist guerrillas. |
| Pol Pot | led Khmer Rouge, Cambodian Communist guerrillas, to overthrow government; destroyed all Western influences; killed over one million Cambodians. |
| Mujahedin | Muslim religious warriors; fought Russian forces in Afghanistan. |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Soviet leader who eased the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe; Communist governments collapsed; launched glasnost and perestroika. |
| Glasnost | means "openness"; Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of relaxing censorship and encouraging free speech; contributed to the collapse of communism in Europe. |
| Perestroika | "restructuring" in Russian; a Soviet policy of democratic and free-market reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. |
| Lech Walesa | leader of independent trade union Solidarity; demanded political change; elected president of Poland in first free elections in 50 years. |
| Solidarity | independent Polish labor union led by Lech Walesa that fought for political and economic change. |
| Vaclav Havel | dissident writer and human rights activist elected president in Czechoslovakia's first democratic elections after the collapse of communism. |
| Nicolae Ceausescu | Romanian dictator overthrown and executed when he refused to initiate reforms in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. |
