w. 12 - NATO + Warsaw Pact

Here is some material that we used in class on Friday, 24 March


The informational video about NATO

w. 11

After our enriching week in Berlin, it's time to get back in the saddle and continue with our unit on the Cold War.

We lose Monday's lesson to the studiedag. So Friday is our first lesson, and we will be starting with the Marshall Plan speech, and then we will read the Soviet response to the Marshall Plan. You will find both of these in one document on Vklass. If you find that you usually need a little extra time to read English texts, you can go ahead and get a head start on the MP text.

Also, surprise! -- well, not really, because I'm telling you here -- there will be a little map quiz on Friday. So have a look at Europe during the Cold War.

Marshall Plan

Here's a documentary about the Marshall Plan:

The Cold War and the Olympics

While in Berlin, we heard from one museum (maybe it was the Stasi Museum, so then it would be only Sa that heard this, I'm not sure) about the state-sponsored doping programs that East Germany had. The links below will lead you to some wonderful graphics that compare the number of medals won by each country. First off, I'll note that sports, and the Olympics in particular, became one of the fields where Cold War adversaries tried to outdo their "enemies," so sports became very serious business in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the government was in charge of the various training programs for the Olympic teams. In the U.S., however, the coaches and training programs were not under the management of the government.

The winter Olympics, from 1924 to 2010 (which is the last time I found this graph).
The summer Olympics, from 1896 to 2008

In these graphics, look at what happens to  East Germany from the 1968 to 1980. During these years, France and Great Britain had populations more than three times that of East Germany. Today we know that state-sponsored doping was behind the remarkable improvement in East German performances.

If you scroll down below the graphic, you can find a list of the medal breakdown for each country.

As a side note, you can look at the state-sponsored doping that appears to still be going on in Russia, as many sources have presented over the past year.

Here's a screen shot of the graphic -- but you can make it "play," so that the bubbles move and change from year to year.