Postindustrial Society and the End of the Cold War Order

1960s–1989

The 1960s and 1970s were filled with turmoil fueled by feelings of both optimism and despair. During these years, millions of people took to the streets to challenge cold war politics and society. As the first document illustrates, for a few brief months in 1968, people in Czechoslovakia challenged Soviet communism and implemented a liberal government. A wave of public demonstrations swept across Europe and into the United States, where students protested against the war in Vietnam and for a more open political discourse. The second document captures some of their voices while the third—a photograph of Vietnamese children burned by napalm, which appeared in newspapers worldwide—puts human faces on the tragedy of war. At the same time, new threats to world stability emerged, as the fourth and fifth documents illustrate. In 1973, Arab countries attacked Israel and united to restrict the West’s access to crude oil. The growing threat of terrorism in the major Western nations posed additional challenges. No one could have foreseen that the political landscape would dramatically shift in the late 1980s when the Soviet Empire disintegrated. The final document pulls back the curtain on this drama, revealing how government-sponsored state reforms set the stage not for brutal repression, as they had in Prague twenty years earlier, but rather for the end of the cold war.