Churchill coined 'Iron Curtain' in a small-town Missouri college gymnasium
On 5 March 1946, no longer prime minister, Winston Churchill traveled to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a speech formally titled 'The Sinews of Peace.' In it he warned that 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,' describing Soviet control of Eastern Europe. The phrase stuck instantly and gave the emerging Cold War its defining metaphor for the next four decades.