The History of the Twentieth Century

The combination of higher reparations payments and a slower economy led the German government to pursue harsh and unpopular austerity policies.

The crash of the stock market was a shock, but what did it mean? No one was sure, but over the next 18 months, the US economy went from bad to worse.

There were voices warning that the stock market was overpriced, but even in October 1929, there were louder voices proclaiming that all was well, right up to the moment the bottom fell out of Wall Street.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, America already had a reputation for stock speculation, but the Roaring Twenties set new records.

Unusually heavy rainfall led to widespread flooding in the Mississippi Valley in 1927. The Coolidge Administration's Secretary of Everything, Herbert Hoover, was tasked with flood relief. What kind of relief you got depended heavily on your skin color. Meanwhile, a different sort of flood was rising on the New York Stock Exchange.

Five years into his premiership, Mussolini ruled over a one-party state. He projected an image of il Duce, the tireless, indispensable leader of the Italian people as he cracked down on dissent at home and unrest in Libya.

Although Mussolini had come to power by legal means, he soon cast the moment as a Fascist revolution, and pushed for changes to the electoral system that would tighten the Fascist grip on the country.

The Algeciras Conference awarded Spain a strip of territory in northern Morocco known as the Rif, which became Spanish Morocco. But an award of territory granted by a conference of diplomats is one thing; actual control is another.

In the early 1920s, Gandhi's first nationwide satyagraha campaign saw unprecedented Hindu-Muslim unity, but led to violence and failed to achieve its aims. Gandhi spent some time in prison, but by 1930, with a Labour government in power, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress felt ready to declare independence.

Henry Ford built a successful car company based on the principle of mass production of affordable cars. But his company was eclipsed by General Motors, which had a totally different marketing strategy: planned obsolescence.

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.