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Europe is an ever-changing landscape of culture and society. Many major advances in technology and knowledge were introduced to this scene in the nineteen-sixties. Political transformation took place in this decade as well as social and ethnic changes. The beginning of the Space Age marked scientific enhancements just as the second Vatican Council meeting was a sign of cultural attempts to bring a group up to date with the times. The building of the Berlin Wall signaled feuding between governments and their differences.
The Space Age was inaugurated with the launching of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957. Yet astronautics originated in the early nineteenth century. As early as 1819 Konstantin e E. Ziolkovsky, the founding father of Russian space science, predicted the of a space rocket employing liquid fuel and liquid oxygen capable of thrusting man into space. From 1957 to 1961, Russian spaceships were the first top carry live animals, to reach the vicinity of the moon and orbit the sun, and to photograph the far side of the moon. While America was reaching significant scientific progress, Russia clearly dominated the excitement of space exploration.
In March of 1961, Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would soon place a man in space. Within a few weeks, on April 12, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The spaceship Vostok I weighed 10, 395 pounds, orbited the globe in eighty-nine minutes at a top speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Gagarin's journey was incredibly smooth. He reported writing a note, drinking, and eating. Reentry into Earths atmosphere, more rapid than anticipated marred his capsule, but Gagarin landed safely four hundred miles southeast of Moscow.
The United States and Russia were both struggling for world prestige. This advance in exploration sparked the fire that would launch every spaceship following. It created a bloodless battle between capable nations to reach above and beyond its competitors successes in astronautical progress. The United States planned to land a man on the moon by 1970. John F. Kennedy promised the American public that he would close the spaceship gap.
After World War II, Berlin became a place that was occupied by Russia, the United States, France, and Great Britain. The territory that the land fell in was Russian according to agreements of the conquering nations, but since it was the capitol of Germany, it was jointly occupied by all of the nations. The Russians guaranteed access to the city from the Western zones, but only the air corridors were specifically mentioned in writing. The entire city was to be ruled by the Four-Power Control Commission with unanimous consent necessary for all decisions. The difficulties of governing under these conditions became apparent as eth Cold War intensified after 1945. The Russians wanted to incorporate Berlin into their zone, and in 1948 they blockaded the land approaches to the city in an effort to force out the Western powers.
After nine months of a successful Allied airlift, the Russians lifted the blockade, but the Control Commission was not restored. The Eastern and Western sectors of the city were ruled separately, by unspoken agreement. The Western Allies agreed to allow a West German government in their zones, and the Federal Republic of German Democratic Republic under Walter Ulbricht. The Western Allies and the Russians, however, still maintained troops in their respective areas, including eth city of Berlin. By 1957, Khrushchev had established himself as leader in Russia after the power struggle after Stalin's death. In 1958, he delivered an ultimatum stating that if the German problems were not solved by mutual agreement within six months, he would turn over control of the city and its approaches to the East Germans.
The West agreed to a conference, but this produced no results. By 1961, the problem of Berlin became apparent. Large numbers of refugees from Communist Europe and particularly East Germany were using the city as an escape route to the West. Ulbricht was losing most of his skilled workers and productive people.
John F. Kennedy became president in January of 1962. East Germany was losing thousands of people a day. On August 13, the East Germans began closing the checkpoints between eth two sectors of the city and started construction of a barbed wire barrier along the entire border between east and West Berlin. This barrier was soon replaced with a concrete wall. Khrushchev then announced that he was giving over control of eth city to the East Germans.
Although West Germans were denied the right to cross into East Berlin, the crisis soon eased. The flow of refugees was stopped and East Germany began a period of extraordinary economic growth. The West accepted the Berlin Wall as eth best solution to a bad situation, with the realization that both Khrushchev and Ulbricht had been forced into this action by circumstances that might have led to war. This rare occurrence of negations and action taken by nations proved two points; that the United States still had rights in all of Berlin under agreements, and that the Russians, despite their claims of turning over control of Berlin to East Germany, were still the power in East Germany and East Berlin. In the Roman Catholic Church, certain reformist movements began to surface visibly after World War II. The movements varied, but they included such aims as harmonizing theology with science and modern philosophy, greater social action on the part of Catholics, and reforms in the official worship of the church.
In 1958, Pope John XXIII was elected to his seat as leader of eth Catholic Church. His time as Pope proved to be perhaps the most eventful for eth Church in nearly four hundred years. From the first day of his reign, he was not aloof like many of the Popes before him. He was jovial, informal, and apparently open-minded.
He visited the slums and prisons of Rome, raised wages for workers at the Vatican, and told jokes about himself. According to the Popes later account, the idea of summoning a general council of the Church occurred to him in late 1958. Pondering a way of showing an example of peace and hope to the world. He proposed his idea of a council to a group of eighteen cardinals in Rome. Their response was stunned silence. They began making objections to the idea and insisted that it would take at least ten years to organize such a thing.
The general, council is an institution dating back officially to Biblical times, the first recognized council being that of Jerusalem reported in Acts 1: 5. Prior to Pope John Xxiii's reign, the only two councils in modern times were the Council of Trent, which reformed the Roman Catholic Church following the Protestant Council, and the First Vatican Council, whose principal work was t...
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Research essay sample on Roman Catholic Church John F Kennedy
