I said WWII, and then had the slow dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc second.
That's for Western culture.
It was 1993 when I asked the teachers why they didn’t think of WWII.
The map of the entire world changed as a consequence.
The USSR rose, the communists took over China and drove the nationalists to Taiwan, England had to give up most of it’s empire and was destroyed as a world power.
France stupidly tried to reclaim it’s territory in Indochina.
The communist viet minh fought the Japanese in French Indochina and morphed into the viet cong after Truman let Russia have influence in the north. Korea was likewise split between communist and democratic nations.
As a consequence of WWII the USA became the only power strong enough to stand against the USSR which led to the Cold War.
That doesn’t even mention the atomic bombs and other advances in science influenced by the war.
We agree that WWII was the defining event of the 20th century.
Outside of my marriage and children’s births, the day the people started streaming across the Berlin wall and taking sledge hammers to it was one of the happiest days of my life.
I remember being at the 7UP distributor in Richmond, VA making a delivery.
The tv was on in the office and it was on every channel.
We could hear the Germans yelling something but couldn’t make it out.
The shipping supervisor had been raised in Hungary, escaped, became a US citizen, served in Vietnam and had worked for 7UP for years. He told us it was Tor Auf meaning “open the damned gate”.
I never will forget the look on his face...angelic.
Only downside was GHW Bush was in office and not Reagan.