Curated playlist
Presidency of Harry S. Truman
- Cold War1947–1991 geopolitical rivalry between US and USSR
- McCarthyismMcCarthyism begins, in many ways, not with the senator whose name it bears, but with a single sheet of paper. On the 9th of February 1950, Joseph McCarthy stood before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished…
- Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiThe atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of them civilians. On the 6th of August 1945, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, on the 9th of August, a second…
- Truman DoctrineThe Truman Doctrine began with an eighteen-minute speech. On the 12th of March 1947, President Harry S. Truman stood before a joint session of Congress and declared that the United States must support free peoples resisting subjugation by…
- Presidency of Harry S. TrumanThe Presidency of Harry S. Truman began not with an election, but with a phone call. On the 12th of April 1945, Truman was urgently summoned to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt met him and told him the President was dead. Truman,…
- Potsdam ConferenceThe Potsdam Conference opened on the 17th of July 1945, just sixteen days after the most destructive war in human history had ended in Europe. Three men gathered at Cecilienhof, a palace in Potsdam within the Soviet occupation zone near…
- Point Four ProgramThe Point Four Program got its name from a simple accident of ordering. When President Harry S. Truman delivered his inaugural address on the 20th of January 1949, he listed four foreign policy objectives. The fourth one would reshape how…
- Marshall PlanThe Marshall Plan sent $13.3 billion across the Atlantic to rebuild a continent that had been reduced to rubble. Named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall, it ran for four years beginning on the 3rd of April, 1948, and reshaped the…
- Occupation of JapanOn the 2nd of September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, Japan signed the instrument of surrender that ended the largest war in human history. What followed was something with no real precedent: a foreign power taking…
- Turkish Straits crisisThe Turkish Straits crisis began in the summer of 1946 when the Soviet Union handed Turkey a note demanding that the rules governing the narrow waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean be torn up and rewritten. Two thin…
- Trust Territory of the Pacific IslandsThe Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was a place measured in ocean, not land. In 1969, just 100 occupied islands held a combined land area of 700 square miles, yet they were scattered across a water expanse roughly the size of the…