Communism vs. capitalism 

It would be easy to dismiss the Cold War simply as proof that Capitalism was a better theory than Communism. Easy, but not the whole story. In order for Communism to be relegated to the dustbin of history, it first had to be proven that its struggle against Capitalism was unnecessary and thus irrelevant. How did the US and the USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th Century to allow Communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

1) Remember to cite and reference both the book and an outside scholarly source.

2) The main text for this course is Brower’s The Word in The Twentieth Century: From Empires to Nations. This week, you will read from Chapter 8, “Cold War and Revolutions in East Asia, and Chapter 13,”The West from Cold War to European Union.” The fall of communism in the Soviet Union paralleled the movement toward a European Union in the West. When the Soviet empire vanished, the map of Europe returned to nation-states that were often divided by language and culture.

3) TEXTBOOK,

Brower, D., & Sanders, T. (2014). The world in the twentieth century: From empires to nations (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.