466 midterm...

Here is the midterm for Cold War...the questions aren't hard, I had no trouble with them whatsoever. Some of the material you will use for this is yet to come, so no need to panic.

History 466
Cold War
Midterm exam…for October 11, 2007


Directions Part I(60%): Prepare the following questions, taking care to support your answers with specific names, facts, dates, etc. On test day, you will answer ONE, but you do not know WHICH one, so prepare them all(unless you are clairvoyant)


A)In the Ken Burns documentary “The War,” viewers learn about the titanic struggle between the US, Great Britain and the USSR on the one hand and Germany, Italy and Japan on the other in World War II. Victory was a team effort, requiring a common strategy, coordination and millions of casualties. How did it happen that this “marriage” ended in divorce, with victorious allies becaming bitter enemies, glowering at each other across barbed-wire borders, just a couple of years after that happy meeting in Berlin? In other words, how did we get a nasty, antagonistic Cold War after the successful conclusion of the Hot War?

B)We have looked at both the American and the Soviet point of view about the disagreements attending the end of World War II. In this essay, put yourself in the shoes(well, maybe “position,” Soviet shoes weren’t that comfortable)of a Soviet citizen circa l945 and explain why you believe your leader, Stalin, took absolutely the right course of action in the latter stages of World War II and the immediate postwar.

C) When it became evident that Stalin and the USSR had designs on territories beyond those they had liberated in the war, how did the United States respond? Describe the strategy President Truman and his aides fashioned to counter this threat.


Part II: Identifications(40%). Identify, discuss briefly and give the significance of the following. You will do FOUR of FIVE on test day(I get to pick the five): Atlantic Charter, Nazi-Soviet Pact l939, Stalingrad, “second front,” Potsdam and Yalta conferences, Poland, Berlin, “Iron Curtain,” “Long telegram.”