African Independence

The Europeans basically imperilized the continent and took it for themselves. Until recently 1955-1970, Africa had been gaining their independence. The French, Spanish, English etc. took over them for a long time. They used them for their natural resources and cheap labor.

Ghana was the first country to gain their independence. Kwame Nkrumah was the leader. He was a teacher who spent time studying in the united states and came back to get rights for his country, but ended up becoming the president of Ghana and the English left.

Another nation was Kenya. This country was special because their leader/president was in prison then he was elected as the leader. This is one of the two countries that did this. The leaders name was Jomo Kenyatta. He led the Mau Mau's so he can scare the white men away without any war.

You can see during the fighting for independence, Africa changed a lot, they gained all of their independence from the European countries except for a select few and most of them got to eliminate their country's names and change them to something more African and create a flag. For example Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, then they changed it and created their own national flag to show their independence.

Film Lesson: "The Right Stuff"

" The Right Stuff " was a movie made in the 80's about how the US and Russia were challenging each other for the first to make it to the moon.This war was a war with no fighting in it. In the movie, they were competing on who could get to mach 1 speed which is about 750 mils per hour( speed of sound ) and mach 2 which was about 1500 miles per hour ( 2x the speed of sound).

Then they showed how the Russians launched their first satellite into space. Then the US heard about this and then they choose 7 experience pilots who must of had went to college to be the first astronauts . One of the main character of the movie was not able to go up with them due to the fact he was not a college graduate. The Russians was winning because they launched the first satellite into space but then the US was trying to put men on the moon. They were not successful at first because many of there tests have failed month after month. So they decided to send a monkey up there for no humans losses. That however was a big mistake because it showed that the Russians had more guts by sending up a human before us.

The scenes that will help me remember the battle between Russia and the US would be the Mach1 scene which was very impressive and the scene were they were getting the 7 highly educated pilots ready for the big mission.

NATO and The Warsaw Pact

The ones who created Warsaw pact were USSR and 8 other communist countries.

The ones who created NATO were France, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland

NATO stands for the (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The NATO was for the United States and countries of east and some western European countries. If a country would attack a nation that was a member of NATO, all of those other countries would team up like a pact or crew and attack the enemies. In response to this, the Warsaw pact was created.In May 1955, the USSR made the Warsaw Treaty in response to the scare of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO in October 1954. This pact would not be powerful unless the Soviet Union was part of it. Back then, the only two superpowers in the world was the United States and the Soviet Union. Unlike NATO, the Warsaw Pact was weakening because of the political scene of Russia towards the 80s and it fully dissolved in the 90s.