Map of the Cold War Available from Ball State University Libraries

This Day in History: Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 14, 1962, an American U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile being assembled for installation in Cuba.  Thus began one of the biggest encounters of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union—the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Following a naval blockade, nuclear war was avoided when President Kennedy agreed to not invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviet removal of all missiles in Cuba.

The Ball State University Libraries’ GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) created a map of some of the most significant events of the Cold War.  The map (above, click to enlarge) shows the locations of events beginning with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 to the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The Cold War map, Capitalism vs. Communism: Events of the Cold War, is available for use in education, research, and learning for teachers, students, and others from the Libraries’ Cardinal Scholar repository.  A large-format copy of the map may be printed in the GRMC. A worksheet requiring students to map the events of the Cold War is also available for teachers to use in the geography or history classroom.

The Atlas Collection on the second floor of Bracken Library also includes resources for studying the Cold War.  The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Cold War, The Canadian Military Atlas, and The Times Atlas of European History all include maps and other cartographic sources.

For more information about using maps from the GRMC or Cardinal Scholar, please call 765-285-1097.