Churchill’s 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech warned of growing Soviet domination

British Prime Minister Churchill’s speeches rallied the nation

Winston Churchill’s impassioned wartime oratory united Britain’s resolve, transforming fear into defiance and forging a path to continued resistance against Nazi aggression.

The Cold War (1947-1991) prompted the birth of NATO and the Soviet Warsaw Pact

The geopolitical rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union was considered “cold" because the two countries never directly engaged in military combat during the time period. This page from the Kennedy Presidential Library outlines the causes and major events of the early Cold War.

The Kennan Telegram shaped early US Cold War strategy

In 1946, diplomat George Kennan sent a long telegram from Moscow warning that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist. His analysis laid the groundwork for the US policy of containment that defined the early Cold War.

Soviet control spread across Eastern Europe after WWII

In the late 1940s, the USSR solidified control over Eastern Europe by installing pro-communist regimes in countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania—often through rigged elections and political repression.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 speech framed World War II as a global fight for universal rights

Eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt outlined four fundamental freedoms that, in his words, people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy—speech, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Reagan’s 'tear down this wall' speech challenged Soviet control of Berlin

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall and urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The speech became one of the most iconic moments of the Cold War and a symbol of growing pressure on the Eastern Bloc.

How Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill shaped the postwar world

The Yalta Conference was a pivotal 1945 meeting between Allied leaders that helped shape the postwar global order and laid the groundwork for the founding of the United Nations.

Stalingrad was the turning point of WWII in Eastern Europe

The six-month siege (July 1942–February 1943) ended when the Soviet Union’s counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, encircled and destroyed Germany’s 6th Army. This decisive victory shifted momentum permanently to the Soviets on the Eastern Front, marking a major strategic reversal in Europe and undermining Nazi Germany’s war capacity.

The Marshall Plan aimed to rebuild Europe and limit Soviet influence

Launched in 1948, the Marshall Plan provided over $12B (roughly $150B today) in US aid to help rebuild Western Europe. While framed as economic recovery, it also served as a Cold War tool—tying countries to the US and excluding the Soviet bloc.

Read Orwell's original preface to 'Animal Farm,' criticizing the publishers who had rejected the book

Orwell's opening remarks for the 1945 publication chastised the publishers who'd rejected the manuscript, even quoting one of them directly who said they weren't interested in offending the Soviet Union, a British ally. The essay was not included with the book, though it appeared several decades later, after Orwell's death, in the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1914, the Financial Times asked readers to redraw Europe for cash prizes

Two months in World War I, the newspaper invited readers to sketch postwar borders and submit peace terms for cash prizes. The contest captured public attempts to predict a new world order and foreshadowed modern crowdsourced forecasting. It's a wild look at how uncertain Europe's future was at the time.

Bobby Fischer’s 1972 victory ended Soviet dominance of chess

In Reykjavik, American Bobby Fischer defeated Soviet champion Boris Spassky to claim the world title. The Cold War showdown drew global attention, breaking the USSR’s 24-year grip on the championship.

The 1956 Suez crisis was one of the earliest tests of the rules-based order

When Britain, France, and Israel secretly invaded Egypt, the Eisenhower administration supported UN resolutions condemning the invasion and called for a ceasefire—publicly criticizing its closest allies to uphold the principle that force should not be used to resolve international disputes.

The Civil War turned the Continental Divide into an American symbol of identity

Historians argue that the boundary only became a celebrated American symbol in the 1860s, when Civil War-era leaders promoted a west-east geographic divide to replace the devastating north-south political divide, and that the term's use spiked after the transcontinental railroad crossed it in 1868.

Einstein warned the president that splitting atoms could lead to powerful bombs

In a 1939 letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein explained that nuclear fission could produce immense energy—and devastating weapons. The warning helped spur the Manhattan Project, a role Einstein later deeply regretted.

Who were the Cambridge Five

Recruited in the 1930s, the Cambridge Five infiltrated British intelligence and leaked secrets to the Soviets for decades, shaping WWII and the Cold War.

Read an excerpt from the Monroe Doctrine, introduced in Monroe's 1823 address to Congress

On Dec. 2, 1823, President Monroe delivered his seventh annual message to Congress, now known as the State of the Union. One segment—warning European powers against interfering in the Western Hemisphere—became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Proponents argue that abandoning the rules-based order risks a return to the chaos that led to 2 world wars

Brookings scholar Robert Kagan warns that if China and Russia gain regional dominance, the world could return to the unstable conditions of the late 19th century—the same chaos that led to two devastating world wars.

'Dr. Strangelove' is widely considered the best satirical film

Stanley Kubrick’s satire about nuclear war came just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and spoke to Americans still coming to terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In 1989, the Library of Congress included it among the first 25 films preserved in the National Film Registry, a repository for the greatest achievements in cinema.

'Under God' was added to the pledge in 1954 as an anti-communist statement

When President Eisenhower signed the phrase into law on Flag Day 1954, the intent was ideological: to distinguish American democracy from "godless" Soviet communism. The author of the original 1892 pledge, Francis Bellamy, was himself a Baptist minister who believed in the separation of church and state, making the addition an inversion of his intent.

The wild, early history of the tunnel across the English Channel

Britain and France today are connected by the Chunnel—a tunnel bored roughly 120 feet under the seabed of the notoriously choppy English Channel, which opened in 1994. The dream of integrating Britain with the rest of the continent this way began much earlier, with daring, physically impossible plans proposed as early as the 19th century. Check out the earliest plans here.

Defining the use of 'Third World' in geopolitics

The term "Third World" is mostly out of use today for its limiting connotations, but in light of a reordering of geopolitical alliances amid the Ukraine war, historians are reevaluating the term's usefulness. Read the history of the term starting from the 1950s, and learn what several experts claim about its contemporary efficacy.

The ACLU was founded in 1920 in direct response to the suppression of speech during World War I

The mass arrest and prosecution of anti-war activists, socialists, and immigrants under the Espionage and Sedition Acts prompted a group of civil libertarians to form the American Civil Liberties Union to defend constitutional rights.

The term schizophrenia was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908

He launched the word during a lecture at the German Psychiatric Association in Berlin. In his talk he focused on the splitting of psychic functioning as a defining feature of the disease and noted it wasn't associated with dementia or factors like early puberty onset.

Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant power held by workers, not elites

Lenin argued that capitalism concentrated power in a small ruling class, and only transferring authority to industrial workers could eliminate exploitation and class hierarchy. This five-minute explainer outlines how he envisioned that revolutionary shift.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the largest ground war in Europe since World War II in casualties, forces mobilized, and displacement of civilians.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

Volcanic activity may have triggered the Black Death by spewing gases that led to crop failures in Europe, thus forcing the import of grain ships with plague-infested fleas.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is independent of Iran's regular army and is one of the most powerful and influential military-political organizations in the Middle East.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.