Indian independence was achieved in 1947 and immediately after the country was divided into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan - a division that is named the Great Partition. It was a period of great instability and devastating sectarian violence as many millions of people migrated thousands of miles. Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971. It had originally been a part of Pakistan, known as East Pakistan.

The Great Leap Forward was an economic policy of the Communist Party of China under Mao. Its primary goals were to transform China from a largely agrarian society to a modern socialist state through immediate industrialization and the collectivization of resources. Many modern historians believe that the Great Leap Forward led to widespread famine and the death of tens of millions of people in China.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 ushered a communist regime, led by Fidel Castro, into power in Cuba. This negatively impacted Cold War relations between the United States and the Soviet Union because it meant the existence of a militarized communist state less than one hundred miles off of the American mainland.

Reza Shah pursued a policy of secularization rather than one of imposing religion on the population.

The term “intifada” refers to a series of violent uprisings of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The first “intifada” is also the most famous one, it took place from 1987 to 1993. Relations between Israel and Palestine have oscillated in intensity over the years, but have always been contentious and intermittently violent ever since the creation of Israel in the wake of the Second World War.

Muammar al-Gaddafi came to power in a coup d’etat in 1969 and ruled Libya until he was deposed in the Libyan Civil War of 2011. During Gaddafi’s reign Libya embraced a sort of proto-socialism.

Mao Zedong, widely considered the founding father of modern Communist China, came to power June 19, 1945 and was the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. He came to official power after defeating the Kuomintang in the Chinese civil war and forcing Chiang Kai-Shek onto the island of Formosa (Taiwan). 

The May Fourth Movement takes its name from massive public protests that occurred throughout May 1919, in which thousands of students, young intellectuals, and tradespeople gathered to protest their government’s interactions with and accommodations of foreign powers. The seeds of this dissatisfaction were first sown by the Treaty of Versailles (which ended World War One), whose terms were largely unfavorable to China. Many Chinese people were especially incensed by the Treaty’s awarding of disputed territories to Japan – this furor was only increased by the Chinese government’s apparent easy acquiescence to the Treaty’s demands. It was this explosion of nationalistic and anti-foreign sentiment that set off the May Fourth Movement, as more and more individuals began to call for an end to their current leadership, whose ranks, they felt, were far too dominated by foreign appeasers and isolated intellectuals. Many of these protesters were inspired by the recent populist and socialist systems then being employed by Lenin’s Russia. The most vital and long-lasting consequence of this movement was the creation of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which was founded by many of these student protesters and young, disaffected scholars. The ensuing chaos would eventually lead to the Chinese Civil War and the CPC’s subsequent victory and political dominance under Mao Zedong.

Launched by the Shah of Iran in 1963, the White Revolution was intended to rid the country of suspected communists, whom the Shah blamed for his massive unpopularity among the Iranian population. In practice, the White Revolution consisted of several reforms (including the expansion of women’s education, a decrease in state-owned corporations, and land redistribution). The Shah hoped that these measures would increase his popularity among Iran’s poor, working, and middle classes, while at the same time undermining the intellectuals and wealthy individuals who disagreed with many of his governing policies. However, the Shah’s White Revolution had precisely the opposite consequences from those he’d intended. In fact, many Iranians objected to the Shah’s changes, which they saw as being pro-Western and too anti-traditionalist in nature. The widespread disapproval of the White Revolution would play a significant factor in the later overthrow of the Shah during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Perestroika, which literally translates to 'restructuring' in Russian, was the policy of wide-ranging internal reforms within Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachev and included both political and economic reforms.