Julian E. Zelizer
Torn strips of paper frame a historic image of the three World War II leaders.Robert Hopkins's iconic photo of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945 is seen through torn strips of paper on an advertisement in Moscow on June 19, 2020. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
It has been 80 years since World War II ended. That historic moment brought celebration, euphoria, and collective relief. The devastating war was finally over; fascism, it seemed, had been defeated. The mood in the United States was perhaps best captured by the iconic photograph of a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a woman in New York City’s Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945, after the news broke that Japan had surrendered.
But it didn’t take long for Americans to realize that international threats were far from over. In the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States quickly took hold. With the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons, the stakes of avoiding a full-scale confrontation increased dramatically.
No comments:
Post a Comment