Cold war
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I know what you are thinking when you look at the picture”That looks like a dummy” and you would be right because Ivan Ivanovich was a dummy. Weeks before Yuri Gagarin made a successful orbit of the Earth, a Soviet mannequin named Ivan Ivanovich (the Russian equivalent of John Doe) tested the dangers of spaceflight and…
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Explorer 1 was the first satellite of the United States, launched as part of its participation in the International Geophysical Year. The mission followed the first two satellites the previous year; the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 and 2, beginning the Cold War Space Race between the two nations. Explorer 1 was launched on January 31, 1958 at 22:48 Eastern Time (February 1, 03:48 UTC) atop the first Juno booster…
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On January 27 1967, U.S. astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch simulation at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo program changed forever , when a flash fire swept through the Apollo 1 command module during a launch rehearsal test. The three men inside…
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Checkpoint Charlie was first set up in August 1961, when communist East Germany erected the Berlin Wall to prevent its citizens from fleeing to the democratic West. While it was only one of several crossings in and around Berlin—there was also a Checkpoint Alpha and Bravo—Charlie was notable for its location on Friedrichstrasse, a historic…
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There you are having your minding your own and before you know it there is a MiG 21 parked in your living room. This is what happened to some inhabitants of the Plattenbau” building, Cottbus, East Germany. On January 14th, 1975, Major Peter Makowicka, 33, wass on a training mission with his Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG 21…
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It is often though that the Vietnam war started in the 60s, but in fact it dates back much further then that. It really started on the 19th of December 1946. In February Ho Chi Minh had already sent a telegram to U.S. President Harry S. Truman requesting support for independence. The First Indochina War (December 1946 to…
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Most people will have heard of the “Manhattan Project” it was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. Despite the data gathered from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, the nuclear testing were still conducted in an extremely reckless manner far…
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I am not going too deep into the re-unification of Germany. I will leave the images do the talking. German reunification (Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) took place on October 3, 1990, when the areas of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, in English commonly called “East Germany”) were incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, in English commonly called “West Germany”), both…
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It can be argued that WWII never really ended or that the cold war wasn’t really all that cold. Immediately after WWII, in fact technically still during the War in the Pacific,Indonesia declared it’s independence triggering an armed conflict with the Dutch and British. Under pressure from radical and politicised pemuda (‘youth’) groups, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesian…
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Hans Conrad Schumann (March 28, 1942 – June 20, 1998) was an East German soldier who famously defected to West Germany during the construction of the Berlin Wall on 15 August 1961. Conrad Schumann was immortalized in this photograph as he leapt across the barricade that would become the Berlin Wall. The photo was called “The Leap into Freedom”. It became an…
History of Sorts 
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