Unit 9: Cold War and Contemporary Europe

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.14, on contemporary culture, arts, and demographics: the diverse, global, and consumer-driven culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the rise of mass and popular culture, and the demographic trends of ageing populations, immigration, and secularization reshaping European society.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.8, on 20th-century feminism: the winning of the vote in the early 20th century, the wartime expansion of women's roles, the postwar feminist movement's campaigns for legal, economic, and reproductive equality, and the transformation of women's position in European society.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.6, on contemporary Western democracies: how postwar western Europe built stable, prosperous welfare-state democracies, the rise of consumer society and social change, the politics of consensus and protest, and the challenges of economic downturn and social tension.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.1, setting the scene for Unit 9: the devastation and division of Europe after the Second World War, the rise of the United States and Soviet Union as superpowers, and how the wartime alliance broke down into the ideological and geopolitical struggle of the Cold War.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.15, the continuity-and-change reasoning skill applied to Unit 9 and the whole course: what the contemporary era changed (the end of the Cold War, integration, prosperity, diversity) and what persisted (nationalism, great-power tension), and how to structure a continuity-and-change LEQ or DBQ across long spans.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.9, on decolonization: how and why the European overseas empires were dismantled after World War II, the roles of anti-colonial nationalism, European weakness, and Cold War pressures, and the consequences including new nations, migration, and lasting global ties.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.13, on globalization: the deepening economic, technological, and cultural interconnection of the contemporary world, its transformation of European economies and societies, the role of migration and integration, and the tensions and backlash it provoked.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.5, on postwar nationalism, ethnic conflict, and atrocities: the population transfers after World War II, the suppression of ethnic tensions under the Cold War order, and the violent re-eruption of nationalism after 1989, above all in the wars and ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.2, on the rebuilding of Europe after 1945: the Marshall Plan and the Western European economic miracle, the construction of welfare states and mixed economies, and the contrasting Soviet-imposed reconstruction of communist eastern Europe.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.12, on contemporary technology: the postwar and contemporary advances in computing, communications, space, and medicine, how they transformed European daily life and the economy, and the new social and ethical questions they raised.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.3, on the Cold War: the ideological and geopolitical struggle between the capitalist West and the communist East, the division of Europe and Germany, the policy of containment, the arms race and rival alliances, and how the conflict shaped Europe without direct superpower war.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.10, on European integration and the European Union: how postwar Europe moved from war toward cooperation, starting with coal and steel and widening to a common market and then the European Union in 1993, its causes and achievements, and the tensions over sovereignty and identity that it raised.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.7, on the fall of communism: the economic stagnation and political repression that undermined the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev's reforms, the popular movements that swept eastern Europe in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

A focused answer to AP European History Topic 9.4, on the emergence of two superpowers: how the United States and the Soviet Union rose to dominate the postwar world, how they built rival military and economic blocs, the place of nuclear weapons, and the eclipse of the old European great powers.