The 1900s (1900-1999) are the twentieth century after Christ according to common reckoning. It was a time of high invention, world war and cold war. Man learned how to make an aeroplane to fly, a rocket to go to the moon, but also an atom bomb to destroy whole cities.
In 1900 most of the world was ruled by empires:
Austrian, Ottoman, Dutch, British, French, Portuguese, Russian, American and Chinese. One by one all but the last two fell. By 1999 this had divided the world into nearly 200 countries.
In the early 1900s two up and coming countries, Germany and Japan, wanted empires too. This led to two world wars. These two countries conquered much of Europe and Asia for a while, but in the end they lost everything and wound up with foreign armies on their soil. The wars, however, did do in other empires, like the British and Ottoman.
By the middle of the century only two strong countries remained: America and Russia. Both had atom bombs and the rockets to send them across the sky to destroy each others’ cities. For most of the late 1900s the world stood at the edge of the abyss. This was the cold war.
In the end America destroyed Russia not with bombs but by outspending it in an arms race. Russia went broke and its empire fell apart. But by the end of the century other countries had figured out how to build an atom bomb: China, India, Pakistan and, off the record, Israel.
When the Russian empire fell no one called it that. It was called the Soviet Union, the old empire of the tsar ruled by communists.
Lenin overthrew the Russian government in 1918 and made the country communist. Mao did the same in China in 1949. So did Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
Communists followed the idea of Karl Marx. Private property was outlawed: everything was owned by the government, all the land, all the businesses, all the industry. Communists did this to make all men equal, to end both poverty and wealth.
It sounded good on paper, but in real life men lost their freedom and had to wait in line for even the simple things of life. It led to the evils that Orwell wrote about in “Animal Farm” and Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago.”
In the West a soft form of communism called socialism became common.
During the second world war Hitler, the leader of Germany, killed a third of the Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. After the war, Britain gave the Jews Israel. Not since Roman times have they had their own country.
In science Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, the master substance that life is made out of.
Honourable mentions: radio, car, Freud, Einstein, telephone, Picasso, Joyce, film, fundamentalism, Lindbergh, Stalin, Churchill, Gandhi, Tolkien, computer, television, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther King, Jr, the Beatles, flower children, 1968, the Internet.
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Love this article, particularly the writing style, its makes the world of the 20th century sound like a magical place, not so mechanized and soulless and the world we live in today
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Rosalind Franklin did as much to discover DNA as Watson and Crick. Her data was the data used in their discovery.
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the 1700s was the best century
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