The Twentieth Century
A World History
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Never before had any century in history known the continually accelerating rate and scope of change experienced in the twentieth century -- with its revolutionary discoveries, technological inventions, political upheaval, and scientific advances, radical transformation touched virtually every arena of life.
In The Twentieth Century: A World History, R. Keith Schoppa uses a global lens spanning Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, and the Americas. He traces the major developments of the twentieth century from the rise of globalization to the dawn of the digital age; from the Great War of 1914-18 to the “great war in Africa,” conflicts that span the first genocide of the century in Namibia to that of Bosnia-Kosovo in the late 1990s. It was the “century of the refugee,” as the explosion of human violence caused significant population displacement-and it was also the century of indigenous peoples fighting off the lingering impacts of imperialism. This volume surveys various U.S. struggles in battles for civil rights, and witnesses the 1992 collapse of Soviet communism. The century ended in a spasm of violence: four African and European national genocides and the African war, one of the ten deadliest in history, involving nine nations, leaving 6 million dead and 5.4 million refugees.
From the collapse of empires to the rise of decolonized nation-states on the global stage, The Twentieth Century: A World History offers a rich chronological narrative of our recent past and provides a valuable historical standpoint from which to view our twenty-first century world.
Customer Reviews
An eye-opener
After dithering for weeks, I finally bought the text of this book to go with the audiobook. Part of the reason was to verify the names of the lesser-known people who figure in each chapter, which are not always possible to hear clearly in the audio — at least not clearly enough to look them up elsewhere. Another reason was to verify that some of the material I thought was missing is actually not here: for example, there is nothing here about the Boxer Rebellion; nothing about Freud or psychiatry and the tremendous strides forward in mental health treatment in the 20th century; nothing about the Boer War; nothing about El Salvador, the Sandinistas, the Shining Path, Daniel Ortega, or other significant developments in Latin America. All of these would have been consistent with the author’s overall thesis and emphasis. But that also partly explains why they were omitted: in a short history of such a large topic, many things need to be left out; what’s remarkable is how much was put in. There are surprises, many of them shocking and horrifying, on nearly every page, even for someone like me whose life spanned half the century. I had, for example, never heard about the Herero genocide or the Great War of Africa.
Another reason for buying the book is for the illustrations. It’s one thing to read about Josephine Baker; it’s another to see a picture of her in costume. It’s one thing to read about the allied firebombing of Tokyo; it’s another to see the hideous piles of burned bodies. It’s one thing to read about Chernobyl, another to see a field littered with gas masks left behind by civilians fleeing in panic. The captions to the photographs sometimes provide additional information not otherwise appearing in the text. This is how I wish illustrations were usually used. But it also highlights the limitations of audio, when the audio is distributed, as the audio for this book was, without an accompanying PDF.
And of course there are other aspects of the text that wouldn’t fit in an audio presentation: some of them could work in a PDF, but most not. The appendices include a useful high-level chronology of the century; the notes are not just pointers to sources but sometimes include additional commentary; and there is a chapter-by-chapter bibliography. All of these increase the usefulness of the book.
If the other volumes in the series are as well put together as this one, it will be an important series well worth the investment of time it will take to read it, or even to sample a part of it. Many of the volumes available so far seem to be regional or national in scope (Southeast Asia, Russia, Iran) or topical (genocide, technology); only a few are compendiums of information about a broad period like this one. I hope the intention is to include more such chronological volumes in the series.