Ronald Reagan is often lauded as the U.S. President who won the Cold War, by orchestrating a massive arms buildup that the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to match, and by giving a famous 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ...read more
Few death-penalty executions can equal the controversy created by the electrocutions of spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. Accused of overseeing a spy network that stole American atomic secrets and handing those over to the Soviet Union, the couple were the only spies ...read more
After Chinese officials—alarmed at the June 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—ordered soldiers and police to shoot and kill student protesters, one solitary man stood out from the crowd. Historian and journalist T.D. Allman, who witnessed the ...read more
Frank Sinatra was many things: A crooner who could make bobby-soxers faint, an Academy Award-winning actor, the elder statesman of the Rat Pack. At the height of his career, it was rumored that “every woman wants to have him; every man wants to be him.” But his fans and ...read more
As the freight train whisked its way over the Alabama rails in 1931, nine boys’ lives were changed forever. The details of their skirmish with a group of white men and two women on the train are still unclear. But by the end of the train ride, nine young men—all African-American, ...read more
Great events do not always have great causes. One of history’s biggest surprises is how sometimes a series of small, seemingly insignificant events can suddenly add up to momentous change. That’s how it happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the point-of-no-return moment in ...read more
The Reichstag Fire was a dramatic arson attack occurring on February 27, 1933, which burned the building that housed the Reichstag (German parliament) in Berlin. Claiming the fire was part of a Communist attempt to overthrow the government, the newly named Reich Chancellor Adolf ...read more
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. The word “Gulag” is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. The notorious prisons, which incarcerated about 18 million ...read more
The Great Purge, also known as the “Great Terror,” was a brutal political campaign led by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a threat. Although estimates vary, most experts believe at least 750,000 ...read more
If you’d visited Warsaw in 1945, you might not have recognized it as a city at all. Destroyed by the Nazis in retribution for a 1944 uprising, the city was pocked by craters and reduced to miles and miles of rubble. It wasn’t just the capital: Much of Poland was rubble by the end ...read more
Palmer raids were a series of violent and abusive law-enforcement raids directed at leftist radicals and anarchists in 1919 and 1920, beginning during a period of unrest known as the “Red Summer.” Named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, with assistance from J. Edgar ...read more
Following the failure of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward—a disastrous attempt to accelerate the Chinese economy that left as many as 45 million dead from famine between 1958 and 1962—the founder of the People’s Republic of China sought to reassert ...read more
In what begins as a fairly minor incident, the American consul and his staff in Mukden, China, are made virtual hostages by communist forces in China. The crisis did not end until a year later, by which time U.S. relations with the new communist government in China had been ...read more
J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for 48 years, reshaping that organization from a small, relatively weak arm of the federal government’s executive branch into a highly effective investigative agency. His aggressive methods targeting ...read more
As the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. became known as the Red Scare. (Communists were often referred to as “Reds” for their allegiance to ...read more
Already infamous for his aggressive interrogations of suspected Communists, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) earned more notoriety via these televised 1954 Congressional hearings. McCarthy had turned his investigations to army security, but the army in turn ...read more
On April 7, 1963, a new Yugoslav constitution proclaims Tito the president for life of the newly named Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Formerly known as Josip Broz, Tito was born to a large peasant family in Croatia in 1892. At that time, Croatia was part of the ...read more
On February 21, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, is published in London by a group of German-born revolutionary socialists known as the Communist League. The political pamphlet–arguably the most influential in ...read more
Just over a year after the start of the Long March, Mao Zedong arrives in Shensi Province in northwest China with 4,000 survivors and sets up Chinese Communist headquarters. The epic flight from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, nearly ...read more
In October 1934, during a civil war, embattled Chinese Communists broke through Nationalist enemy lines and began an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as the Long March, the trek lasted a year and covered some 4,000 miles (or more, by some ...read more
The embattled Chinese Communists break through Nationalist enemy lines and begin an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as Ch’ang Cheng—the “Long March”—the retreat lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, nearly twice the distance from New ...read more
Rosa Luxemburg, the leader of a revolutionary faction of the German socialist party during World War I, is born on this day in 1871, in Zamos, Poland, an area that at the time was under Russian control. The youngest of five children in a lower-middle-class Jewish family, ...read more
On this day in 1974, Italian prosecutor Mario Sossi is kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was the first time that the left-wing terrorist group had directly struck the Italian government, marking the beginning of tensions that lasted for 10 years. The Red Brigades were founded by ...read more
The God That Failed, a collection of essays by six writers and intellectuals who either joined or sympathized with the communist cause before renouncing the ideology, is published by Harpers. The book provided interesting insight into why communism originally appealed to, and ...read more
