Cold War annotated timeline

Children in a duck and cover drill, New York 1962, Author Unknown, Library of Congress, Picryl, Public Domain

Activity  

Learners in this activity will work in small groups to develop an annotated timeline of a particular decade during the Cold War period. Each group will be given a decade to analyse, research and present their annotated timeline at the end of the lesson, including  images and links to historical sources.

To begin students will be shown examples of annotated timelines and the teachers will detail sort of the information required in an annotated timeline and how the learners will need to identify the causes and consequences of the key events in the decade students are researching in. Students will then engage in their groups and will be allocated a decade to research further.

Using the following resource from the Truman Library  as a starting point (noting this is an American interpretation of key events) students will reserach key events that occurred in their decade during the Cold War:

Truman Library Cold War Timeline

The groups are then expected to develop their timeline physically on paper or digitally. This should include researchingkey events further encouraging primary and secondary source analysis skills, to then annotate the events in the timeline.

Cause and consequence: Additionally, the timeline should identify the cause and effect or consequence that event had on the events following it or the cause and effect or consequences that event had on politics, social dynamics, migration, and or technology. One way to do this would be to identify long and short term consequences.

After each group presents their timelines, the class can discuss or brainstorm how events from the timeline their group created affected events that occurred on the other groups’ timelines.