122 Videos: The Cold War

In this video, John Green teaches you about the Cold War, which was the decades long conflict between the USA and the USSR. The Cold War was called cold because of the lack of actual fighting, but this is inaccurate. There was plenty of fighting, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan, but we’ll get into that stuff later. This episode, we’ll talk about how the Cold War started. In short, it grew out of World War II. Basically, the Soviets occupied eastern Europe, and the U.S. supported western Europe. This setup would spill across the world, with client states on both sides. It’s all in the video. You should just watch it.

In this second video, John Green teaches you about the Cold War as it unfolded in Asia. As John pointed out previously, the Cold War was occasionally hot, and a lot of that heat was generated in Asia. This is starting to sound weird with the hot/cold thing, so let’s just say that the United States struggle against communist expansion escalated to full-blown, boots on the ground war in Korea and Vietnam. In both of these cases, the United States sent soldiers to intervene in civil wars that it looked like communists might win. That’s a bit of a simplification, but John will explain it all to you.