American History Second Semester Exam Review: Cold War and the United States

What is containment?

• Trying to keep communism from spreading 
• Trying to build a stockpile of weapons to fight Russsia
• The same government program to keep knowledge of Japanese internment camps from spreading
• The name for containing radiation in Japan after the atomic bombs

The United Nations was created to

• rebuild Europe after WWII
• promote international peace and protect human rights
• to be a governing political system
• to establish geographical and political boundaries 

The Korean War was

• a victory for the United Nations and containment was successful.
• a victory for North Korea and communism won.
• a stalemate where neither side won, and the boundaries didn't change.
• chaos. Russia almost joined and we almost had nuclear war. 

Why was the Berlin Wall built?

• To keep Americans from visiting East Germany
• To embarrass the Western nations
• To stop East Germans from fleeing into West German to escape communism
• To show how successful communism was

Who was in charge of the communist "witch hunts" in the 1950s?

• Joseph Stalin
• John Donne
• Mao
• Joseph McCarthy

________ was the idea of taking the U.S. to the edge of war to prevent communism from spreading.

• Brinkmanship
• The Marshall Plan
• The Potsdam Conference
• Containment

Who authorized the training of Cuban exiles to try to help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader, Fidel Castro? 

• Johnson
• Truman
• Kennedy 
• Stalin

What was the Bay of Pigs?

• A horrible massacre committed by the North Koreans on a small village in South Korea
• An embarrassing attempt by the U.S. to overthrow Castro 
• A code name for Castro's policy of containing communism 
• A bay in North Korea that the U.S. invaded and held for the entire war

Why was the United States so concerned with Russia putting missiles in Cuba?

• We were afraid that Cuba would fire them on our ally, Mexico
• Cuba is very close to the United States and it would allow Russia to easily attack us
• The Russians could now easily attack Puerto Rico, one of our most valuable territories for oil 
• We knew that Cuba would refuse to allow Russia to use their country for missile launches, and that it could start a war between them.

What was the "iron curtain"?

• an actual curtain in Stalin's war room
• a term used to discuss the divide between Western and Eastern Europe following WWII
• another name for the 37 parallel
• a Soviet war tactic