A chronicle of the westward movement beginning with Columbus in 1492. Includes concise biographies and topic essays.

For over forty years much of the world was held captive by a conflict between two wholly incompatible economic ideologies-capitalism and communism-and the two primary superpower countries who practiced them, the United States and the Soviet Union. This work is first a general history of the Cold War, with an overview of its root causes and the policies and theories that were in place from 1947 through 1990. A thoroughly annotated chronology of important...