Case Studies

  • Consumerism in Poland

    Throughout Eastern Europe, the decade of the 1980s was a time of significant change, including the everyday lives of average citizens. This case study looks at visual representations of consumer culture in Poland in an effort to examine the larger role that consumer goods played in the daily lives of those who lived in Eastern Europe.

  • Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate

    In June 1987, President Reagan delivered an important speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. This case study looks at how to use the speech as a means to examine US foreign policy and the end of the Cold War.

  • Memory in East Germany

    This case study examines how a group of East German dissidents re-appropriated the memory of Rosa Luxemburg and turned her writing against the Communist Party during an annual parade in January 1988.

  • Letter by the Bratislava Five

    This case study addresses a protest in Bratislava during the summer of 1989 aimed at commemorating the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion by publicly laying flowers at various locations in Slovakia where citizens had been killed in 1968.

  • Czech Independence Day Speech

    The dramatic changes in Eastern Europe happened so rapidly and over so broad an area that making these events understandable for students can be a challenge. This case study uses a landmark speech by Vaclav Havel as a means to unpack the rapid events of 1989.

  • Humor as Resistance

    In order to help students think about the dynamics of power in different kinds of societies, this case study attempts to challenge the black-and-white thinking to which students are inclined when thinking about Communism. By analyzing jokes from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) we can see how people sought to create their own sense of freedom.

  • Women in Romania

    Using oral histories, this case study explores various aspects of women’s daily lives in Communist Romania and women’s attitudes toward the changes wrought by the transformation to a pluralist system and to a market economy after the collapse of the regime in December 1989.

  • The Collapse of Yugoslavia

    This case study examines the rewriting and reworking of Serbian national history that accompanied the breakup of Communist Yugoslavia, especially by intellectuals, and the role such groups played in reconstructing and resurrecting a distinct narrative of Serbia’s national history.

  • Remembering Tiananmen Square

    Although China is located quite far from Eastern Europe, dissidents in Eastern Europe identified with the struggles by opposition leaders in China and used images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to reinforce memories of resistance in Eastern Europe.

  • Soviet Health Posters

    This case study examines two posters that address the increasingly embarrassing and difficult health crisis of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout this period, the poster remained the most typical form of propaganda and thus are an important element in teaching the Soviet experience.

  • Surnames and Nationality

    Images of 1989 tend to center on dramatic events in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, or other major East European cities. However, many of the changes in Eastern Europe and the world were far more subtle but no less important. This case study explores a new law passed in Italy in 1991, which was also an attempt to limit the the abuses of Communism as much as a regime change.

  • Simulating the Velvet Revolution

    This case study simulates the process of the extraordinarily quick (and often peaceful) overthrow of various communist regimes is Eastern Europe in 1989. The simulation provides a powerful experiential study of how dissent can quickly cascade through a group, leading to fast, dramatic change.