Harry Truman in the context of "Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"

General Order No. 1 for the surrender of Japan was prepared by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by President Harry Truman on August 17, 1945.

It was issued by General Douglas MacArthur to the representative of the Empire of Japan following the surrender of Japan, and then issued by Japanese Imperial General Headquarters to the forces of the Empire of Japan on 2 September 1945. It instructed Japanese forces to surrender to designated Allied commanders, reveal all current military deployments, and preserve military equipment for later disarmament. It also specified the occupation of Japan and Japanese-controlled areas by forces of the Allied Powers.

The Potsdam Conference (German: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from 17 July to 2 August 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were represented respectively by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to an unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The goals of the conference also included establishing the postwar order, solving issues on the peace treaty, and countering the effects of the war.

The foreign ministers and aides played key roles: Vyacheslav Molotov, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin, and James F. Byrnes. From 17 July to 25 July, nine meetings were held, when the Conference was interrupted for two days, as the results of the British general election were announced. By 28 July, Attlee had defeated Churchill and replaced him as Britain's representative, with Britain's new Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin, replacing Anthony Eden. Four days of further discussion followed. During the conference, there were meetings of the three heads of government with their foreign secretaries, as well as meetings of only the foreign secretaries. Committees that were appointed by the latter for precursory consideration of questions before the conference also met daily. During the Conference, Truman was secretly informed that the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb on 16 July had been successful. He hinted to Stalin that the U.S. was about to use a new kind of weapon against the Japanese. Though this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given information about the atomic bomb, Stalin was already aware of the bomb project, having learned about it through espionage long before.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (/ˈædleɪ/; February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) was an American politician and diplomat who was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 1961 until his death in 1965. He previously served as the 31st governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and was the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States in 1952 and 1956, losing both elections to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Stevenson was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson, the 23rd vice president of the United States. He was raised in Bloomington, Illinois. After a short stint in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War I, he became a lawyer. He served in many positions in the federal government during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman presidential administrations, including in the Department of the Navy, and the State Department during World War II. In 1945, he served on the committee that created the United Nations, and was a member of the initial U.S. delegations to the UN.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. (/ˈmɔːrɡənθɔː/; May 11, 1891 – February 6, 1967) was the United States Secretary of the Treasury during most of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He played a major role in designing and financing the New Deal. After 1937, while still in charge of the Treasury, he played the central role in financing the United States participation in World War II. He also played an increasingly major role in shaping foreign policy, especially with respect to Lend-Lease, support for China, helping Jewish refugees, and proposing (in the "Morgenthau Plan") measures to deindustrialize Germany.

Morgenthau was the father of Robert M. Morgenthau, who was district attorney of Manhattan for 35 years; Henry Morgenthau III, an American author and television producer; and noted pediatrician Dr. Joan Morganthau Hirschhorn. He continued as Treasury secretary through the first few months of Harry Truman's presidency, and from June 27, 1945, to July 3, 1945, following the resignation of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr., was next in line to the presidency. Morgenthau was the only Jew to be next in line to the presidency in the presidential line of succession.

Carlos Castillo Armas (locally ['kaɾlos kas'tiʝo 'aɾmas]; 4 November 1914 – 26 July 1957) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who was the 28th president of Guatemala, serving from 1954 to 1957 after taking power in a coup d'état. A member of the far-right National Liberation Movement (MLN) party, his authoritarian government was closely allied with the United States.

Born to a planter, out of wedlock, Castillo Armas was educated at Guatemala's military academy. A protégé of Colonel Francisco Javier Arana, he joined Arana's forces during the 1944 uprising against President Federico Ponce Vaides. This began the Guatemalan Revolution and the introduction of representative democracy to the country. Castillo Armas joined the General Staff and became director of the military academy. Arana and Castillo Armas opposed the newly elected government of Juan José Arévalo; after Arana's failed 1949 coup, Castillo Armas went into exile in Honduras. Seeking support for another revolt, he came to the attention of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1950 he launched a failed assault on Guatemala City, before escaping back to Honduras. Influenced by lobbying by the United Fruit Company and Cold War fears of communism, in 1952 the US government of President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFortune, a plot to overthrow Arévalo's successor, President Jacobo Árbenz. Castillo Armas was to lead the coup, but the plan was abandoned before being revived in a new form by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.

Operation PBFortune, also known as Operation Fortune, was a covert United States operation to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1952. The operation was authorized by U.S. President Harry Truman and planned by the Central Intelligence Agency. The United Fruit Company had lobbied intensively for the overthrow because land reform initiated by Árbenz threatened its economic interests. The US also feared that the government of Árbenz was being influenced by communists.

The coup attempt was planned with the support of the United Fruit Company and of Anastasio Somoza García, Rafael Trujillo and Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the US-backed right-wing dictators of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela respectively, who felt threatened by the democratic Guatemalan Revolution, and had sought to undermine it. The plan involved providing weapons to the exiled Guatemalan military officer Carlos Castillo Armas, who was to lead an invasion from Nicaragua.

Presidential elections were held on Tuesday, November 7, 1944. The election took place during World War II which ended the following year. The Democratic ticket of incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Senator Harry Truman defeated the Republican ticket of New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and Ohio Governor John Bricker to win an unprecedented fourth term. It was also the fifth presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1860, 1904, 1920, 1940, and 2016. Though the margin of victory was still a landslide, this was Roosevelt's weakest performance in his four elections, and the popular vote split was less lopsided.

Roosevelt had become the first president to win a third term with his victory in the 1940 presidential election, with little doubt that he would seek a fourth term. Unlike in 1940, Roosevelt faced little opposition within his own party, and he easily won the presidential nomination of the 1944 Democratic National Convention. Concerned that Roosevelt's ill health would mean the vice president would likely become president, the convention dropped Roosevelt's vice president Henry A. Wallace in favor of the lesser known Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. Governor Dewey of New York emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination after his victory in the Wisconsin primary, and he defeated conservative Governor John W. Bricker at the 1944 Republican National Convention.

The Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1950 (Pub. L. 81–600) was an Act of the 81st United States Congress, which passed unanimously in the United States Senate and with one dissenting vote, from pro-independence Vito Marcantonio, in the United States House of Representatives. Signed into law on July 3, 1950 by President Harry Truman, the Act enabled the residents of Puerto Rico to organize the insular government of the unincorporated territory under a constitution of its own, comparable to those of states of the United States. Established under the Act and its Pub. L. 82–447 joint resolution in 1952, the Constitution of Puerto Rico superseded the Jones–Shafroth Act of 1917 as the primary organic law for the local government of Puerto Rico and its relation with the United States.

With the approval of the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1950, the full authority and responsibility for the local government of Puerto Rico was vested in the residents of Puerto Rico, resulting in complete self-governance within the archipelago and island.

A newspaper hawker, newsboy or newsie is a street vendor of newspapers without a fixed newsstand. Related jobs include paperboys, delivering newspapers to subscribers, and news butchers, selling papers on trains. The job was historically done by children, especially in the United States. The profession has faced significant decline worldwide in modern times owing to the advent of online news.

In the United States they became an iconic image of youthful entrepreneurship. Famous Americans that had worked as newsboys included Bruce Barton, Ralph Bunche, Joe DiMaggio, Thomas Edison, Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Rayburn, Walter Reuther, David Sarnoff, Cardinal Spellman, Harry Truman and Mark Twain.