WORLD HISTORY UNIT 6
(Chapter 28) MODERNITY &
CONTEMPORARY TIMES
VOCABULARY TERMS
History means life is to be lived forwards,
but understood backwards
FOREIGN LEADERS OF MODERNITY
• Leonid Brezhnev
replaced Nikita Khrushchev when
he was removed from office.
• Mikhail Gorbachev
leader of a Communist Party
reformers group
• Boris Yeltsin
president of the Russian Republic
• Vladimir Putin
Russian Republic President
• Pierre Trudeau
Prime minister of Canada 19681979
• Lech Walesa
Polish labor leader and statesman
• Vaclav Havel
a writer who had played an
important role in bringing down the Communist
government
• Margaret Thatcher
Britain's first female prime
minister
The final 3 Russian presidents (not Breshnev)
methodically phased-out communism
USA CONTEMPORARY MAJOR LEADERS
• Richard Nixon
Vice President under
Eisenhower and 37th President of the United
States
• Gerald Ford
38th President of the United States
• Jimmy Carter 39th President of the United States
• Ronald Reagan 40th President of the United States
• George Bush Vice President under Reagan and
41st President of the United States
• Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United
States
• George W. Bush
43rd President of the United
States
What if George Washington were here today?
COMMUNIST RUSSIA
• Detente
a phase of relaxed
tensions and improved relations between
two adversaries
• Perestroika
fundamental
restructuring of the Soviet economy;
policy introduced by Gorbachev
• Brezhnev Doctrine
insisted on
the Soviet Union's right to intervene if
communism was threatened in another
Communist state
Perestroika & Détente led to the collapse
of communism & the fall of the Berlin Wall
SOME BAD THINGS THAT HAPPENED
• Ethnic Cleansing a policy of killing or
forcibly removing an ethnic group from its
lands; used by the Serbs against the Muslim
minority in Bosnia
• Watergate
a political scandal
involving abuse of power and bribery and
obstruction of justice
• Bloody Sunday
day when British troops
fired on a crowd of civil rights protesters and
killed 13 people; January 30, 1972
• Slobodan Milosevic
Leader of Serbia (a
brutal dictator who was later executed)
Bloody Sunday was just one of the
many, many social uprisings in Ireland
AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT
• Reagan Revolution
sent
US policy in new directions
• Cultural Imperialism
referring to Western
nations' control of other
world cultures similar to how
they had controlled colonial
governments
Only now does history show some of
the effectiveness of the Reagan years
SOME CULTURAL ASPECTS
• Postmodernism an artistic
movement that emerged in the
1980s; its artists do not expect
rationality in the world and are
comfortable with many "truths“
• Popular Culture entertainment
created for a profit and for a
mass audience
The Simpsons & Family Guy are a
couple of examples of this:
A FEW TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES
•Chemical
produced by
chemicals
•Sputnik I
Soviet
Union satellite
Another image of Sputnik, the first
object sent into space (by Russians)
WAYS IN WHICH THE RULES CHANGED
• Equal Pay Act required
women to be paid the
same as men for the same
work
• Roe v. Wade legalized
women's rights to abortion
JFK signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963
THE ECONOMICS OF THE TIME
• Thatcherism
the economic policy of
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
which limited social welfare and restricted
union power
• Budget Deficits
the state that exists
when a government spends more than it
collects in revenues
• Currency
coins, for example,
that are in circulation and used as a medium
of exchange
• Globalization
the movement toward a
more integrated and interdependent world
economy
The world gets smaller each passing year
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REGIONS INVOLVED
Bosnia-Herzegovina Area the Serbs
attacked
Kosovoa self-governing province
within Yugoslavia
Munich
the capital and largest city
of Bavaria in southeastern Germany
Basque Region in the western
Pyrenees, and part of the territory
belongs to Spain and part to France
This is a controversial part of Europe
I
ICONS OF THE TIME
•Symbol something
that stands for
something else by
way of association; a
visible sign of
something invisible
Do you know what these modern
symbols mean? Planes/buses/cars/etc.
NATIONS INVOLVED
• Afghanistan
country in Asia
• Ukraine
a republic in southeastern
Europe
• Belarus
a landlocked republic in
eastern Europe
• West Germany
a republic in north central
Europe on the North Sea
• Northern Ireland a division of the United
Kingdom located on the northern part of the
island of Ireland
• France
a republic in western
Europe
Even today, these ex-Soviet break-away
republics are in turmoil with Russia
SOME ATTITUDES OF THE TIME
• Participation
having a part in or
sharing in something
• Responsive
quick to respond or
react to
• Autonomous
self-governing
• Shift
a change in direction
or attitude
• Gender Stereotyping
restricting what a
person could do just because of the person's
gender
• Gender Parity
a policy by which
women have to make up either a certain number
of the candidates in an election or a certain
number of those elected
Virtually no men were nurses in the
1920s-50s. Gender roles have changed
drastically since the late 1960s
PROTESTS & DEMONSTRATIONS
• Dissidents
a person
who speaks out against the
regime in power
• Demonstrations a public
display of group feeling
toward a person or a cause
Since France in 1789, the revolutionary voices of
millions have been heard all around the world