Curated playlist
Cold War conflicts
- Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War began on the 1st of November 1955 and did not end until the 30th of April 1975 - nearly two decades of armed conflict across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that would consume millions of lives and reshape the world order. At…
- Cambodian–Vietnamese WarThe Cambodian-Vietnamese War began on the 25th of December 1978, when 150,000 Vietnamese troops crossed into Cambodia and dismantled a government in just two weeks. That government, the Khmer Rouge, had in the preceding years killed…
- Gulf WarThe Gulf War pitted Iraq against a coalition of 42 countries led by the United States. On the 2nd of August 1990, Iraq invaded its small neighbor Kuwait and occupied the country within two days. Behind that invasion sat a tangle of…
- Malayan EmergencyThe Malayan Emergency began on the 17th of June 1948, the day three European plantation managers were shot dead in the office of the Elphil Estate near Sungai Siput by three young Chinese men. What followed was a twelve-year guerrilla war…
- 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'étatThe 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état unfolded in a single week in late February, turning the last liberal democracy in Eastern Europe into a Communist-controlled state. Twelve non-Communist ministers walked out of their own government on the…
- 1954 Guatemalan coup d'étatThe 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état ended a decade of democratic government in ten days, with an invasion force of just 480 men. The man those men were meant to depose, Jacobo Árbenz, had won a free election and was redistributing uncultivated…
- Congo CrisisThe Congo Crisis began on the 30th of June 1960, the very day the Republic of the Congo celebrated its independence from Belgium. Within a week, the army had mutinied, Belgian paratroopers had landed without permission, and two wealthy…
- United States invasion of GrenadaAt dawn on the 25th of October 1983, the United States invaded Grenada, a small Caribbean island nation, in an operation codenamed Urgent Fury. It was the largest American military action since the Vietnam War. The force that arrived…
- ContrasThe Contras materialized out of the wreckage of a regime. In July 1979, President Anastasio Somoza Debayle abandoned the Nicaraguan presidency and fled. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, the FSLN, had fought for weeks to take the…
- Korean WarAt 4:40 in the morning on the 25th of June 1950, the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel behind a wall of artillery fire. Within an hour, troops were striking all along that line. Within three hours, individual units had pushed…
- Nicaraguan RevolutionThe Nicaraguan Revolution lasted nearly three decades, from 1961 to 1990, and cost tens of thousands of lives before it was over. It began as a student movement in a university in Managua and ended with a democratic election that removed…
- Soviet–Afghan WarThe Soviet-Afghan War began on the 25th of December 1979, when the Soviet 40th Army crossed into Afghanistan under the pretext of extending 'international aid' to a puppet government it had helped install. What followed was nearly a decade…
- 1960 U-2 incidentOn the 1st of May 1960, a United States spy plane took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, bound for a mission the American government would spend days desperately pretending had never happened. The pilot was Francis Gary Powers. His aircraft was…
- Guatemalan Civil WarThe Guatemalan Civil War began not with an ideological declaration but with a mutiny. On the 13th of November 1960, a group of junior military officers at the Escuela Politécnica national military academy staged a revolt against General…
- Cuban Missile CrisisThe Cuban Missile Crisis lasted exactly 13 days in October 1962, and during those 13 days, the world's two nuclear superpowers came closer to destroying each other than at any other point in the Cold War. On one side sat the United States,…
- 1953 Iranian coup d'étatOn the 19th of August 1953, a tank fired a single shell into the home of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the elected prime minister of Iran. He fled through the smoke and rubble, but hours later turned himself in to the army. By nightfall, the…
- Sino-Vietnamese WarThe Sino-Vietnamese War lasted roughly a month, yet its consequences shaped East Asia for the next decade. On the 17th of February 1979, roughly 200,000 Chinese troops crossed into northern Vietnam, backed by Type 59, Type 62, and Type 63…
- Afghan conflictThe Afghan conflict is the name given to a series of wars that have kept Afghanistan in a near-continuous state of armed conflict since the 1970s. By one accounting, somewhere between 1.4 million and 2 million people had been killed by…