The History of the Twentieth Century

Two of the twentieth century's worst technological innovations were leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. Both were introduced by the same person, engineer Thomas Midgley.

In the 1920s, most took it for granted that Western civilization and culture was the pinnacle of human accomplishment. A 23-year-old graduate student set out to prove that this was not the case, and that even the West had something to learn from other cultures.

Charles Darwin himself noted that the development of civilization had "stopped" evolution by natural selection within our own human species. This led others to speculate on whether society could purposefully direct human evolution.

The state of Tennessee had made it a criminal offense to teach evolution in the public schools. The trial of John Scopes became the most famous court case in America of the period.

If the first great scientific debate of the 1920s was over the size and composition of the Universe, the second was over the structure and nature of the atom. It turned out that the common-sense rules of our everyday world don't apply at the atomic level.

The French know the Roaring Twenties as the "crazy years," when Coco Chanel was the queen of fashion and Dada art was making everyone scratch their heads.

Music has always been a part of theatre, from opera to vaudeville. But in the 1920s, the first true stage musicals appeared.

New York City grew to be the most populous city in the world in the 1920s, as well as home to the world's tallest buildings and the world's champion smart alecks.

In the early twentieth century, France had the world's largest motion picture industry, but it was soon eclipsed by that of the USA, a larger nation where movies were extremely popular. By 1920, 8 out of 10 motion pictures made in the world came from the United States.

The period from roughly 1924-1933 was a time when Germany threw off the shackles of Imperial authoritarianism and embraced the new and modern in art and culture.

Churchill was out of Parliament for a couple of years following the 1922 general election. When he returned, it was as a Conservative and as chancellor of the exchequer in the new Tory government of Stanley Baldwin.

History seemed to teach that the gold standard was the key to prosperity. But the postwar world was a different place. Economist John Maynard Keynes dismissed the gold standard as a "barbarous relic."

The RCA partners settled their dispute, new technologies appeared on the horizon, including television, and the radio series, an ongoing show chronicling the adventures of a fixed cast, became a new form of entertainment.

Radio broadcasts were begun by companies that wanted to sell radios and were offered free of charge. But as the radio craze bloomed, it became apparent that broadcasting was going to have to pay its own way somehow.

From its invention, radio was conceived as a means for wireless two-way communication. Radio telegrams. Radio telephones. But as the technology matured, some in the field saw the potential for radio to become much more.

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.