The History of the Twentieth Century

After the death of Lenin, the USSR was a socialist state without a clear understanding of what that meant. Stalin ended Lenin's New Economic Policy and created a centralized push for industrialization known as the Five-Year Plan.

The death of Sun Yat-sen came at an inopportune moment, just as the Nationalists were poised to regain control over China. Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the Party's new leader. He ended the United Front and attacked and killed Communists.

By 1922, the Lloyd George government was challenged on many fronts, which led to a general election and a new prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law. Perhaps the biggest challenge was debt repayment to the United States.

Prohibition came as something of a surprise, and there was widespread flouting of the law. A new drinking culture emerged, and criminal gangs made more money, and became more violent, than ever.

By the Revolutionary era, male British colonists in North America were among the heaviest drinkers the world had ever seen. 150 years later, alcoholic beverages were banned in the US and Canada.

Hardly anyone knew anything about Calvin Coolidge when he became President, yet he managed to run an Administration that accomplished much and remained popular.

The Teapot Dome scandal became the biggest corruption scandal in US government history. For the first time, a US cabinet secretary was sent to prison for official misdeeds.

By 1923, evidence was mounting of scandal within the Harding Administration. The President did not acknowledge this publicly, but privately he agonized about it. It may have been a factor in his death in August.

Jazz music, by its nature, has to be heard to be understood and appreciated. In an earlier time, it might have remained a regional or ethnic niche music for some time, but thanks to the phonograph, one musician or band could teach jazz to millions.

Jazz has its roots in a number of other musical forms: band music, spirituals, blues, and ragtime.

After years of warlord infighting, some of the major factions were exhausted, while striking workers agitated for reform. It was time for the United Front to make its move, but the untimely death of Sun Yat-sen complicated the picture.

Warren Harding was very much a hands-off kind of leader. This worked well when he appointed capable cabinet secretaries, especially Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Meanwhile, America experiences the Tulsa Massacre, the worst single episode of racial violence in its history.

Gandhi returned to India during the Great War, but needed some time to reacquaint himself with the country after being away for so long. The British promise more self-rule, but the ruthless killing of hundreds of peaceful, unarmed civilians in Amritsar is for many Indians the last straw.

Mohandas Gandhi went to South Africa to represent an Indian business in a legal dispute. He stayed for 23 years, practicing law, advocating for equal rights for Indians, and developing his theory of resistance, which he called satyagraha.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, astronomers had some idea of the size and shape of our galaxy, though the consensus was that the galaxy represented the entirety of the Universe. But in the decades that followed, it became clear that the Universe was much more.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the younger generation of nationalists had become impatient with its elders' polite political agitation and sought ways to increase the pressure on the British to grant Indians more autonomy.

Britain's control over India was not the main reason the UK rose to become the superpower of the 19th century, but the wealth extracted from India preserved British supremacy for decades longer than otherwise would have been possible, but at a terrible cost to the Indians.

In 1858, the British government took direct control over India. This was supposed to cure the injustices of Company administration, but life in India grew worse, not better.

India is one of the world's oldest nations. In the early 18th century, it was the world's largest economy. By the end of that century, it was entirely under the control of a foreign multinational corporation.

In the two years since the Armistice, virtually nothing had gone right in the United States. In 1920, voters chose the candidate who promised a return to normalcy.

By 1923, inflation was raging in Germany, and so was the right wing.

When reparations payments first came due in 1921, the German economy was in bad shape and the government resisted payment, while the German right opposed paying them at all.

Germany receives the Treaty of Versailles and is given the choice of accepting the treaty as it stands, or restarting the war.

Imposing an indemnity on the defeated enemy after a war was a longstanding practice. At the Paris Peace Conference, reparations were supposed to be something more just and civilized: a charge for losses to civilians during the German occupation of Belgium and France.

The new democratic German government believed they could get a generous peace deal from the Allies. They were wrong.