20th century

2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: General history

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
Categories:	Births – Deaths Establishments – Disestablishments

The twentieth century of the Common Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000, according to the Gregorian calendar. The century saw a remarkable shift in the way that vast numbers of people lived, as a result of technological, medical, social, ideological, and political innovation. Arguably more technological advances occurred in any ten-year period following World War I than the sum total of new technological development in any century before the industrial revolution. Terms like ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage.

The period witnessed radical changes in many areas of human endeavors. Scientific discoveries, such as the theory of relativity and quantum physics, drastically changed the world-view of scientists, causing them to realize that the universe was much more complex than previously believed, and dashing the hopes at the end of the 19th century that the last few details of scientific knowledge were about to be filled in. Accelerating scientific understanding, more efficient communications, and faster transportation transformed the world in those hundred years more rapidly and widely than at any time in the past. It was a century that started with steam-powered ships and ended with the space shuttle. Horses and other pack animals, Western society's basic form of personal transportation for thousands of years, were replaced by automobiles within the span of a few decades. These developments were made possible by the large-scale exploitation of petroleum resources, which offered great amounts of energy in an easily portable and storable liquid form, but also caused widespread concerns about pollution and our long-term impact on the environment. Humanity explored outer space for the first time, even taking their first footsteps on the Moon.

Mass media, telecommunications, and information technology (especially the Internet) put the world's knowledge at the disposal of nearly anyone in most industrialized societies. Many peoples's view of the world changed significantly as they became much more aware of the suffering and struggles of others and, as such, became increasingly concerned with human rights. In the latter half of the century especially, mankind became aware of the vast scale on which it had affected the planet, and took steps to minimize its damage of the planet's fragile ecosystems. Advancements in medical technology also improved the welfare of many people on the planet; life expectancy increased dramatically from the mid-30s to the mid-60s worldwide during the century. The healthiest countries had life expectancies of over 80 years by the turn of the millennium. Rapid technological advancements, however, also allowed warfare to reach an unprecedented scale; World War II alone killed over 60 million people, while nuclear weaponry gave mankind the means to destroy itself in a very short amount of time. The world also became more culturally homogenized than ever with developments in transportation and communications technology, popular music and other influences of Western culture, international corporations, and what was arguably a true global economy by the end of the century.

Summary

The massive arms race of the 19th century culminated in a war which involved many powerful nations: World War I (1914–1918). This war drastically changed the way war was fought, as new inventions such as machine guns, tanks, chemical weapons, and grenades created stalemates on the battlefield and millions of troops were killed with little progress made on either side. After more than four years of trench warfare in western Europe, and 20 million dead, those powers who had formed the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia, later replaced by the United States and joined by Italy) emerged victorious over the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire). In addition to annexing much of the colonial possessions of the vanquished states, the Triple Entente exacted punitive restitution payments from their former foes, plunging Germany in particular into economic depression. The Russian Empire was plunged into revolution during the conflict and transitioned into the first ever communist state, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dismantled at the war's conclusion. World War I brought about the end of the royal and imperial ages of Europe (although some portion of the British Empire remained until the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China) and established the United States as a major world military power.

At the start of the period, Britain was arguably the world's most powerful nation. However, its economy was ruined by World War I, and its empire began to shrink, producing a growing power vacuum in Europe. Fascism, a movement which grew out of post-war angst and accelerated by the Great Depression of the 1930s, gained momentum in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in World War II (1939–1945), sparked off by Nazi Germany's aggressive expansion at the expense of its neighbours. Meanwhile, Japan had rapidly industrialized and transformed itself into a technologically-advanced industrial power. Its military expansion into eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean helped to bring the United States into World War II. Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union in the east and by the D-Day invasion of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Free France from the west. The war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Japan later became a U.S. ally with a powerful economy based on consumer goods and trade. Germany was divided between the western powers and the Soviet Union; all areas recaptured by the Soviet Union ( East Germany and eastward) were essentially transitioned into Soviet puppet states under communist rule. Meanwhile, western Europe was influenced by the American Marshall Plan and made a quick economic recovery, becoming major allies of the United States under capitalist economies and relatively democratic governments.

World War II left about 60 million people dead. When the conflict ended in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as very powerful nations. Allies during the war, they soon became hostile to one other as the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism occupied Europe, divided by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. The military alliances headed by these nations (NATO in North America and western Europe; the Warsaw Pact in eastern Europe) were prepared to wage total war with each other throughout the Cold War (1947–1991). The period was marked by a new arms race, and nuclear weapons, the most devastating ones yet to have been developed, were produced in the tens of thousands, sufficient to end most life on the planet had they ever been used. This is believed by some historians to have staved off an inevitable war between the two, as neither could win if their full nuclear arsenals were unleashed upon each other. This was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Although the Soviet Union and the United States never directly entered conflict with each other, several proxy wars, such as the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1957–1975), were waged to contain the spread of communism.

After World War II, most of the European-colonized world in Africa and Asia gained independence in a process of decolonization. This, and the drain of the two world wars, caused Europe to lose much of its long-held power. Meanwhile, the wars helped the United States to exert a strong influence over many world affairs. American culture spread around the world with the advent of Hollywood, Broadway, rock and roll, pop music, fast food, big-box stores, and the hip-hop lifestyle. After the Soviet Union collapsed under internal pressure in 1991, a ripple effect led to the dismantling of communist states across eastern Europe and their rocky transitions into market economies.

After World War II, the United Nations was established as an international forum in which the world's nations could get together and discuss issues diplomatically. It has enacted laws on conducting warfare, environmental protection, international sovereignty, and human rights, among other things. Peacekeeping forces consisting of troops provided by various countries, in concert with various United Nations and other aid agencies, has helped to relieve famine, disease, and poverty, and to contain local wars and conflicts. Europe slowly united, politically and economically, into what eventually became the European Union, which consisted of 15 European countries by the end of the century.

Perhaps the first major policy of the United Nations was the creation of Israel, a country created as a homeland for the Jewish population. This infuriated some Muslims who had inhabited the area for over a thousand years. Some surrounding Arab countries quickly declared war on Israel, sparking a conflict which became one of the most volatile global conflicts of the latter half of the century. Behind nearly unilateral support from the United States and other Western nations, Israel waged several wars with its Arab neighbors in 1948, 1958, 1967, 1973, and 1982. Anger over the Israeli capture of Palestinian lands during the Six-Day War of 1967 led to a wave of attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), during the 1970s. Negotiations during the late 1980s and 1990s led to the PLO transitioning officially to a political organization; however, other Palestinian groups continued attacks against Israel. A derailing of the peace process during the late 1990s led to a resumption of attacks around the turn of the millennium. The political situation in the Middle East was further complicated as questions arose over the influence of Islam on the governments of many Middle Eastern countries; perceived human rights violations by many of these countries; the possession of vast petroleum and natural gas reserves in the Persian Gulf region; and the Soviet war in Afghanistan that fueled such rogue Islamic groups as Al-Qaeda that would change the political landscape in the following century.

In approximately the last third of the century, concern about humankind's impact on the Earth's environment caused environmentalism to become a major citizen movement. In many countries, especially in Europe, the movement was channeled into politics partly through Green parties, though awareness of the problem permeated societies. By the end of the century, some progress had been made in cleaning up the environment in first-world countries, though pollution continued apace, and environmental problems in newly industrializing countries, such as India and China, had grown rapidly. Increasing awareness and pessimism over global warming began in the 1980s, sparking one of the most heated social and political debates by the turn of the century.

Medical science and the Green Revolution in agriculture enabled the world's population to grow from about 1.65 billion to about 6 billion. This rapid population increase quickly became a major concern and directly caused or contributed to several global issues, including pressure on finite natural resources, conflict, poverty, major environmental issues, and severe overcrowding in some areas.

The nature of change

Due to continuing industrialization and expanding trade, many significant changes of the 20th century were, directly or indirectly, economic and technological in nature. Inventions such as the light bulb, the automobile, and the telephone in the late 1800s, followed by supertankers, airliners, motorways, radio, television, antibiotics, frozen food, computers and microcomputers, the internet, and mobile telephones affected the quality of life for great numbers. Economic development was the force behind vast changes in everyday life, to a degree which was unprecedented in human history. Still, the gulf between the world's rich and poor grew much wider than it had ever been in the past. While increasing industrialization and world trade had helped great numbers out of at least abject poverty by the century's end, the poorer half of the world population — three billion people — lived on the purchasing power of two U.S. dollars or less per day.

Developments in brief

Wars and politics

• After decades of struggle by the women's suffrage movement, all western countries gave women the right to vote.
• Rising nationalism and increasing national awareness were among the many causes of World War I (1914–1918), the first of two wars to involve many major world powers including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Russia/USSR, the United States and the British Empire. World War I led to the creation of many new countries, especially in Eastern Europe. At the time it was said by many to be the "war to end all wars".

• A violent civil war broke out in Spain in 1936 when General Francisco Franco rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic. Many consider this war as a testing battleground for World War II as the fascist armies bombed some Spanish territories.
• The economic and political aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression in the 1930s led to the rise of fascism and nazism in Europe, and subsequently to World War II (1939–1945). This war also involved Asia and the Pacific, in the form of Japanese aggression against China and the United States. Civilians also suffered greatly in World War II, due to the aerial bombing of cities on both sides, and the German genocide of the Jews and others, known as the Holocaust. In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed with nuclear weapons.
• During World War I, in Russia the Bolshevik putsch took over the Russian Revolution of 1917, precipitating the founding of the Soviet Union and the rise of communism. After the Soviet Union's involvement in World War II, communism became a major force in global politics, notably in Eastern Europe, China, Indochina and Cuba, where communist parties gained near-absolute power. This led to the Cold War and proxy wars with the West, including wars in Korea (1950–1953) and Vietnam (1957–1975).
• The Soviet authorities caused the deaths of millions of their own citizens in order to eliminate domestic opposition. More than 18 million people passed through the Gulag, with a further 6 million being exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
• The civil rights movement in the United States and the movement against apartheid in South Africa challenged racial segregation in those countries.
• The two world wars led to efforts to increase international cooperation, notably through the founding of the League of Nations after World War I, and its successor, the United Nations, after World War II.
• The creation of Israel, a Jewish state in the Middle East, by the British Mandate of Palestine fueled many regional conflicts. These were also influenced by the vast oil fields in many of the other countries of the mostly Arab region.
• The end of colonialism led to the independence of many African and Asian countries. During the Cold War, many of these aligned with the United States, the USSR, or China for defense.
• The Great Chinese Famine was a direct cause of the death of tens of millions of Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962. It is thought to be the largest famine in human history.
• The revolutions of 1989 released Eastern and Central Europe from Soviet supremacy. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia dissolved, the latter violently over several years, into successor states, many rife with ethnic nationalism.
• After a long period of civil wars and conflicts with European powers, China's last imperial dynasty ended in 1912. The resulting republic was replaced, after yet another civil war, by a communist People's Republic in 1949. At the end of the century, though still ruled by a communist party, China's economic system had transformed almost completely to capitalism.
• European integration began in earnest in the 1950s, and eventually led to the European Union, a political and economic union that comprised 15 countries at the end of the century.

Culture and entertainment

• As the century began, Paris was the artistic capital of the world, where both French and foreign writers, composers and visual artists gathered. By the end of the century, the focal point of culture had moved to the United States, especially New York City and Los Angeles.
• Movies, music and the media had a major influence on fashion and trends in all aspects of life. As many movies and music originate from the United States, American culture spread rapidly over the world.
• After gaining political rights in the United States and much of Europe in the first part of the century, and with the advent of new birth control techniques women became more independent throughout the century.
• In classical music, composition branched out into many completely new domains, including dodecaphony, aleatoric and chance music, and minimalism. Electronic musical instruments were developed as well, vastly broadening the scope of sounds available to composers and performers.
• The jazz and rock and roll genres developed in the United States, and quickly became the dominant forms of popular music. Many other genres of pop music were born in the latter half of the century, such as heavy metal, punk, alternative, house, dance, reggae, soul, rap and hip-hop.

• The art world experienced the development of new styles and explorations such as expressionism, Dadaism, cubism, de stijl, abstract expressionism and surrealism.
• The modern art movement revolutionized art culture and set the stage for contemporary postmodern art practices.fjgfhggd
• In Europe, modern architecture departed radically from the excess decoration of the Victorian era. Streamlined forms inspired by machines became more commonplace, enabled by developments in building materials and technologies. Before World War II, many European architects moved to the United States, where modern architecture continued to develop.
• The automobile vastly increased the mobility of people in the Western countries in the early to mid-century, and in many other places by the end of the century. City design throughout most of the West became focused on transport via car.
• The popularity of sport increased considerably — both as an activity for all, not just the elite, and as entertainment, particularly on television.

Medicine

• Placebo- controlled, randomized, blinded clinical trials became a powerful tool for testing new medicines.
• Antibiotics drastically reduced mortality from bacterial diseases and their prevalence.
• A vaccine was developed for polio, ending a worldwide epidemic. Effective vaccines were also developed for a number of other serious infectious diseases, including diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), chickenpox, influenza, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B.
• A successful application of epidemiology and vaccination led to the eradication of the smallpox virus in humans.
• X-rays became powerful diagnostic tool for wide spectrum of diseases, from bone fractures to cancer. In the 1960s, computerized tomography was invented. Other important diagnostic tools developed were sonography and magnetic resonance imaging.
• Development of vitamins virtually eliminated scurvy and other vitamin-deficiency diseases from industrialized societies.
• New psychiatric drugs were developed. These include antipsychotics for treating hallucinations and delusions, and antidepressants for treating depression.
• The role of tobacco smoking in the causation of cancer and other diseases was proven during the 1950s (see British Doctors Study).
• New methods for cancer treatment, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and immunotherapy, were developed. As a result, cancer could often be cured or placed in remission.
• The development of blood typing and blood banking made blood transfusion safe and widely available.
• The invention and development of immunosuppressive drugs and tissue typing made organ and tissue transplantation a clinical reality.
• Research on sleep and circadian rhythms led to the discovery of sleep disorders.
• New methods for heart surgery were developed.
• Cocaine and heroin were found to be dangerous addictive drugs, and their wide usage had been outlawed, and mind-altering drugs such as LSD and MDMA were discovered.
• Contraceptive drugs were developed, which reduced population growth rates.
• The development of medical insulin during the 1920s helped raise the life expectancy of diabetics to three times of what it had been earlier.
• The elucidation of the structure and function of DNA initiated the development of genetic engineering and the mapping of the human genome.

Notable diseases

• An influenza pandemic, the Spanish Flu, killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million people between 1918 and 1919.
• A new viral disease, AIDS, arose in Africa and subsequently killed millions of people throughout the world. AIDS treatments remained inaccessible to many people living with AIDS in developing countries, and a cure has yet to be discovered.
• Because of increased life spans, the prevalence of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other diseases of old age increased.
• Sedentary lifestyles, due to labor-saving devices and technology, contributed to an "epidemic" of obesity, at first in the rich countries, but by the end of the century, increasingly in the developing world, too.

Science and technology

• The first airplane was flown in 1903. With the engineering of the faster jet engine in the 1940s, mass air travel became commercially viable.
• The assembly line made mass production of the automobile viable. By the end of the century, billions of people had automobiles for personal transportation. The combination of the automobile and air travel allowed for unprecedented personal mobility.
• The integrated circuit revolutionized computers, leading to the proliferation of the personal computer in the 1980s and the public-use Internet in the 1990s.
• The Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union gave a peaceful outlet to the political and military tensions of the Cold War, leading to man's first landing on another world--the Moon--with America's Apollo 11 mission in 1969. As the century ended, a permanent manned presence in space was being founded with the construction of the International Space Station.

Major events

The world at the beginning of the century

In Europe, the British Empire achieved the height of its power. Germany and Italy, which came into existence as unified nations at the end of the 19th century, grew in power, challenging the traditional hegemony of Britain and France. With nationalism in full force at this time, the European powers competed with each other for land, military strength and economic power.

Asia and Africa were for the most part still under control of their European colonizers. The major exceptions were China and Japan. The Russo-Japanese War in 1905 was the first major instance of a European power being defeated by a so-called inferior nation. The war itself strengthened Japanese militarism and enhanced Japan's rise to the status of a world power. Tsarist Russia, on the other hand, did not handle the defeat well. The war exposed the country's military weakness and increasing economic backwardness, and contributed to the Russian Revolution of 1905, the dress rehearsal for the conclusive one in 1917.

Already in the 19th century, the United States had become an influential actor in world politics. It had made its presence known on the world stage by challenging Spain in the Spanish-American War, gaining the colonies of Cuba and the Philippines as protectorates. Now, with growth in immigration and a resolution of the national unity issue through the bloody American Civil War, America was emerging as an industrial power as well, rivaling Britain, Germany, and France.

With increasing rivalry among the European powers, and the rise of Japan and the United States, the stage was set for a major upheaval in world affairs.

"The war to end all wars": World War I (1914–1918)

The First World War, termed "The Great War" by contemporaries, started in 1914 and ended in 1918. It was ignited by the Assassination in Sarajevo of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's heir to the throne, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand, by Gavrilo Princip of the Serbian nationalist organization " Black Hand". Bound by Slavic nationalism to help the small Serbian state, the Russians came to the aid of the Serbs when they were attacked. Interwoven alliances, an increasing arms race, and old hatreds dragged Europe into war. The Allies, known initially as "The Triple Entente", comprised the British Empire, Russia and France, as well as Italy and the United States later in the war. On the other side, Germany, along with Austria-Hungary , Bulgaria and later the Ottoman Empire, were known as "The Central Powers".

In 1917, Russia ended hostile actions against the Central Powers after the fall of the Tsar. The Bolsheviks negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, although it was at huge cost to Russia. Although Germany shifted huge forces from the eastern to the western front after signing the treaty, it couldn't stop the Allied advance, especially with the entrance of American troops in 1918.

The war itself was also a chance for the combatant nations to show off their military strength and technological ingenuity. The Germans introduced the machine gun and deadly gases. The British first used the tank. Both sides had a chance to test out their new aircraft to see if they could be used in warfare. It was widely believed that the war would be short. Unfortunately, since trench warfare was the best form of defense, advances on both sides were very slow, and came at a terrible cost in lives.

When the war was finally over in 1918, the results would set the stage for the next twenty years. First and foremost, the Germans were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, forcing them to make exorbitant payments to repair damages caused during the War. Many Germans felt these reparations were unfair because they did not actually "lose" the war nor did they feel they caused the war (see Stab-in-the-back legend). Germany was never occupied by Allied troops, yet it had to accept a liberal democratic government imposed on it by the victors after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Much of the map of Europe was redrawn by the victors based upon the theory that future wars could be prevented if all ethnic groups had their own "homeland". New states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire to accommodate the nationalist aspirations of these groups. An international body called the League of Nations was formed to mediate disputes and prevent future wars, although its effectiveness was severely limited by, among other things, its reluctance and inability to act.

The Russian Revolution and communism

The Russian Revolution of 1917 sparked a wave of communist revolutions across Europe, prompting many to believe that a socialist world revolution could be realized in the near future. However, the European revolutions were defeated, Lenin died in 1924, and within a few years Joseph Stalin displaced Leon Trotsky as the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. The idea of worldwide revolution was no longer in the forefront, as Stalin concentrated on " socialism in one country" and embarked on a bold plan of collectivization and industrialization. The majority of socialists and even many communists became disillusioned with Stalin's autocratic rule, his purges and the assassination of his "enemies", as well as the news of famines he imposed on his own people.

Communism was strengthened as a force in Western democracies when the global economy crashed in 1929 in what became known as the Great Depression. Many people saw this as the first stage of the end of the capitalist system and were attracted to Communism as a solution to the economic crisis, especially as the Soviet Union's economic development in the 1930s was strong, unaffected by the capitalist world's crisis.

Between the wars

Economic depression

After World War I, the global economy remained strong through the 1920s. The war had provided a stimulus for industry and for economic activity in general. There were many warning signs foretelling the collapse of the global economic system in 1929 that were generally not understood by the political leadership of the time. The responses to the crisis often made the situation worse, as millions of people watched their savings become next to worthless and the idea of a steady job with a reasonable income fading away.

Many sought answers in alternative ideologies such as communism and fascism. They believed that the capitalist economic system was collapsing, and that new ideas were required to meet the crisis. The early responses to the crisis were based upon the assumption that the free market would correct itself. This, however, did very little to correct the crisis or to alleviate the suffering of many ordinary people. Thus, the idea that the existing system could be reformed by government intervention in the economy rather than by continuing the laissez-faire approach became prominent as a solution to the crisis. Democratic governments assumed the responsibility to provide needed services in society and alleviate poverty. Thus was born the welfare state. These two politico-economic principles, the belief in government intervention and the welfare state, as opposed to the belief in the free market and private institutions, would define many political battles for the rest of the century.

The rise of dictatorship

Fascism first appeared in Italy with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in 1922. The ideology was supported by a large proportion of the upper classes as a strong challenge to the threat of communism.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a new variant of fascism called Nazism took over Germany and ended the German experiment with democracy. The National Socialist party in Germany was dedicated to the restoration of German honour and prestige, the unification of German-speaking peoples, and the annexation of Central and Eastern Europe as vassal states, with the Slavic population to act as slave labor to serve German economic interests. There was also a strong appeal to a mythical racial purity (the idea that Germans were the Herrenvolk or the "master race"), and a vicious anti-semitism which promoted the idea of Jews as subhuman (Untermensch) and worthy only of extermination.

Many people in Western Europe and the United States greeted the rise of Hitler with relief or indifference. They could see nothing wrong with a strong Germany ready to take on the communist menace to the east. Anti-semitism during the Great Depression was widespread as many were content to blame the Jews for causing the economic downturn.

Hitler began to put his plan in motion, annexing Austria in the Anschluss, or reunification of Austria to Germany, in 1938. He then negotiated the annexation of the Sudetenland, a German speaking mountainous area of Czechoslovakia, in the Munich Conference. The British were eager to avoid war and believed Hitler's assurance to protect the security of the Czech state. Hitler annexed the rest of the Czech state shortly afterwards. It could no longer be argued that Hitler was solely interested in unifying the German people.

Fascism was not the only form of dictatorship to rise in the post-war period. Almost all of the new democracies in the nations of Eastern Europe collapsed and were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Spain also became a dictatorship under the leadership of General Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War. Totalitarian states attempted to achieve total control over their subjects as well as their total loyalty. They held the state above the individual, and were often responsible for some of the worst acts in history, such as the Holocaust Adolf Hitler perpetrated on Ashkenazi Jews, or the Great Purge Stalin perpetrated on the Russians later in the century.

Global war: World War II (1939–1945)

The war in Europe

Soon after the events in Czechoslovakia, Britain and France issued assurances of protection to Poland, which seemed to be next on Hitler's list. World War II officially began on 1 September 1939. On that date, Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, against Poland. Britain and France, much to Hitler's surprise, immediately declared war upon Germany, but the help they could afford Poland was negligible. After only a few weeks, the Polish forces were overwhelmed, and its government fled to exile in London (see Polish government in Exile).

In starting World War II, the Germans had unleashed a new type of warfare, characterized by highly mobile forces and the use of massed aircraft. The German strategy concentrated upon the devotion of the Wehrmacht, or German army, to the use of tank groups, called panzer divisions, and groups of mobile infantry, in concert with relentless attacks from the air. Encirclement was also a major part of the strategy. This change smashed any expectations that the Second World War would be fought in the trenches like the first.

As Hitler's forces conquered Poland, the Soviet Union, under General Secretary Joseph Stalin, was acting out guarantees of territory under a secret part of a nonaggression pact between the USSR and Germany known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This treaty gave Stalin free rein to take the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Eastern Poland, all of which would remain in Soviet possession after the war. Stalin also launched an attack on Finland, which he hoped to reduce to little more than a Soviet puppet state, but the Red Army met staunch Finnish resistance in what became known as the Winter War, and succeeded in gaining only limited territory from the Finns. This action would later cause the Finns to ally with Germany when its attack on the Soviet Union came in 1941.

After the defeat of Poland, a period known as the Phony War ensued during the winter of 1939–1940. All of this changed on 10 May 1940, when the Germans launched a massive attack on the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), most probably to surmount the Maginot Line of defenses on the Franco-German border. This witnessed the incredible fall of Eben Emael, a Belgian fort considered impregnable and guarded by 600 Belgians, to a force of only 88 German paratroopers. The worst of this was that King Léopold III of Belgium surrendered to the Germans on 28 May without warning his allies, exposing the entire flank of the Allied forces to German panzer groups. Following the conquest of the Low Countries, Hitler occupied Denmark and Norway, beginning on 9 April 1940. Norway was strategically important because of its sea routes which supplied crucial Swedish ore to the Nazi war machine. Norway held on for a few crucial weeks, but Denmark surrendered after only four days.

With the disaster in the Low Countries, France, considered at the time to have had the finest army in world, lasted only four weeks, with Paris being occupied on 14 June. Three days later, Marshal Philippe Pétain surrendered to the Germans. The debacle in France also led to one of the war's greatest mysteries, and Hitler's first great blunder, Dunkirk, where a third of a million trapped British and French soldiers were evacuated by not only British war boats, but every boat the army could find, including fishing rafts. Hitler refused to "risk" his panzers on action at Dunkirk, listening to the advice of Air Minister Hermann Göring and allowing the Luftwaffe, or German Air Force, to handle the job. The irony of this was that the escaped men would form the core of the army that was to invade the beaches of Normandy in 1944. Hitler did not occupy all of France, but about three-quarters, including all of the Atlantic coast, allowing Marshal Pétain to remain as dictator of an area known as Vichy France. However, members of the escaped French Army formed around General Charles de Gaulle to create the Free French forces, which would continue to battle Hitler in the stead of an independent France. At this moment, Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10 June, thinking that the war was almost over, but he managed only to occupy a few hundred yards of French territory. Throughout the war, the Italians would be more of a burden to the Nazis than a boon, and would later cost them precious time in Greece.

Hitler now turned his eyes on Great Britain, which stood alone against him. He ordered his generals to draw up plans for an invasion, code named Operation Sea Lion, and ordered the Luftwaffe to launch a massive air war against the British isles, which would come to be known as the Battle of Britain. The British at first suffered steady losses, but eventually managed to turn the air war against Germany, taking down 2,698 German planes throughout the summer of 1940 to only 915 Royal Air Force (RAF) losses. The key turning point came when the Germans discontinued successful attacks against British airplane factories and radar command and coordination stations and turned to civilian bombing known as terror bombing using the distinctive "bomb" sound created by the German dive-bomber, the Stuka. The switch came after a small British bombing force had attacked Berlin. Hitler was infuriated. However, his decision to switch the attacks' focus allowed the British to rebuild the RAF and eventually force the Germans to indefinitely postpone Sea Lion.

The importance of the Battle of Britain is that it marked the beginning of Hitler's defeat. Secondly, it marked the advent of radar as a major weapon in modern air war. With radar, squadrons of fighters could be quickly assembled to respond to incoming bombers attempting to bomb civilian targets. It also allowed the identification of the type and a guess at the number of incoming enemy aircraft, as well as tracking of friendly airplanes.

Hitler, taken aback by his defeat over the skies of Britain, now turned his gaze eastward to the Soviet Union. Despite having signed the non-aggression pact with Stalin, Hitler despised communism and wished to destroy it in the land of its birth. He originally planned to launch the attack in early spring of 1941 to avoid the disastrous Russian winter. However, a pro-allied coup in Yugoslavia and Mussolini's almost utter defeat in his invasion of Greece from occupied Albania prompted Hitler to launch a personal campaign of revenge in Yugoslavia and to occupy Greece at the same time. The Greeks would have a bitter revenge of sorts; the attack caused a delay of several crucial weeks of the invasion of Russia.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler attacked Stalin with the largest army the world has ever seen. Over three million men and their weapons were put into service against the Soviet Union. Stalin had been warned about the attack, both by other countries and by his own intelligence network, but he had refused to believe it. Therefore, the Russian army was largely unprepared and suffered incredible setbacks in the early part of the war, despite Stalin's orders to counterattack the Germans. Throughout 1941, German forces, divided into 3 army groups (Army Group A, Army Group B, and Army Group C), occupied the Eastern Europe states of Ukraine and Belarus, laid siege to Leningrad (present day Saint Petersburg), and advanced to within 15 miles of Moscow. At this critical moment, the Russian winter, which began early that year, stalled the German Wehrmacht to a halt at the gates of Moscow. Stalin had planned to evacuate the city, and had already moved important government functions, but decided to stay and rally the city. Recently arrived troops from the east under the command of military genius Marshal Georgi Zhukov counterattacked the Germans and drove them from Moscow. The German army then dug in for the winter.

Here marks the third great blunder of Hitler's. He could have won the war in the USSR except for a few reasons. One, he started the war too late to avoid the Russian winter. Second, he tried to capture too much too fast; he wanted the German army to advance all the way to the Urals, which amounted to one million square miles (2,600,000 km²) of territory, when he probably should have concentrated on taking Moscow and thereby driving a wedge into heart of the Soviet Union. Third, he ignored the similar experiences of Napoleon Bonaparte nearly one hundred and fifty years earlier in his attempt to conquer Russia. Despite this, Stalin was not in a good position. Roughly two-fifths of the USSR's industrial might was in German hands. Also, the Germans were at first seen by many as liberators fighting the communists. Stalin was also not a very able general, and like Hitler, at first tried to fight the war as a military strategist. However, Hitler managed to turn all of his advantages against himself, and lost the only remaining hope for Germany: seizing the Caucasus and taking control of North Africa and the oil-rich Middle East.

Mussolini had launched an offensive in North Africa from Italian-controlled Libya into British-controlled Egypt. However, the British smashed the Italians and were on the verge of taking Libya. Hitler decided to help by sending in a few thousand troops, a Luftwaffe division, and the first-rate general Erwin Rommel. Rommel managed to use his small force to repeatedly smash massively superior British forces and to recapture the port city of Tobruk and advance into Egypt. However, Hitler, embroiled in his invasion of the Soviet Union, refused to send Rommel any more troops. If he had, Rommel might have been able to seize the Middle East, where Axis-friendly regimes had taken root in Iraq and Persia (present-day Iran). Here, Rommel could have cut the major supply route of the Soviets through Persia, and helped take the Caucasus, virtually neutralizing Britain's effectiveness in the war and potentially sealing the fate of the USSR. However, Hitler blundered again, throwing away the last vestiges of the German advantage on his coming offensive in 1942.

After the winter, Hitler launched a fresh offensive in the spring of 1942, with the aim of capturing the oil-rich Caucacus and the city of Stalingrad. However, he repeatedly switched his troops to where they were not needed. The offensive bogged down, and the entire 6th Army, considered the best of German troops, was trapped in Stalingrad. Hitler now refused to let 6th Army break out. He insisted that the German army would force its way in. Hermann Goering also assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army adequately, when it could in reality only supply a minute fraction of the needed ammunition and rations. Eventually, the starved 6th Army surrendered, dealing a severe blow to the Germans. In the end, the defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point for the war in the east.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on 7 December 1941. This disastrous attack forced the Americans into the war. Hitler need not have declared war on the United States, and kept its continued neutrality in Europe, but he did not. Both he and Mussolini declared war only a few days after the attack. At the time, most German generals, preoccupied with war in Russia, did not even notice America's entrance. It was to be a crucial blunder.

Throughout the rest of 1942 and 1943, the Soviets began to gain ground against the Germans. The tank battle of Kursk is one example. However, by this time, Rommel had been forced to abandon North Africa after a defeat by Montgomery at El Alamein, and the Wehrmacht had encountered serious casualties that it could not replace. Hitler also insisted on a "hold at all costs" policy which forbade relinquishing any ground. He followed a "fight to the last man" policy that was completely ineffective. By the beginning of 1944, Hitler had lost all initiative in Russia, and was struggling even to hold back the tide turning against him.

From 1942 to 1944, the United States and Britain acted in only a limited manner in the European theatre, much to the chagrin of Stalin. They drove out the Germans in Africa, invading Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942. Then, on 10 July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, in preparation for an advance through Italy, the "soft underbelly" of the Axis, as Winston Churchill called it. On 9 September, the invasion of Italy began. By the winter of 1943, the southern half of Italy was in Allied hands. The Italians, most of whom did not really support the war, had already turned against Mussolini. In July, he had been stripped of power and taken prisoner, though the Italians feigned continued support of the Axis. On 8 September, the Italians formally surrendered, but most of Italy not in Allied hands was controlled by German troops and those loyal to Mussolini's (Mussolini had been freed by German paratroopers) new Italian Social Republic, which in reality consisted of the shrinking zone of German control. The Germans offered staunch resistance, but by 4 June 1944, Rome had fallen.

The Second Battle of the Atlantic took place from 1942 to 1944. The Germans hoped to sever the vital supply lines between Britain and America, sinking many tons of shipping with U-boats, German submarines. However, the development of the destroyer and aircraft with a longer patrol range were effective at countering the U-boat threat. By 1944, the Germans had lost the battle.

On 6 June 1944, the Western Allies finally launched the long awaited assault on "Fortress Europe" so wanted by Stalin. The offensive, codenamed Operation Overlord, began the early morning hours of 6 June. The day, known as D-day, was marked by foul weather. Rommel, who was now in charge of defending France against possible Allied attack, thought the Allies would not attack during the stormy weather, and was on holiday in Germany. Besides this, the Germans were expecting an attack, but at the natural harbour of Calais and not the beaches of Normandy; a blunder that sealed the operation's success. They did not know about the Allies' artificial harbours, and clues planted by the Allies suggested Calais as the landing site.

By this time, the war was looking ever darker for Germany. On 20 July 1944, a group of conspiring German officers attempted to assassinate Hitler. The bomb they used did injure him, but the second was not used, and a table shielded Hitler in a stroke of luck. The plotters still could have launched a coup, but only the head of occupied Paris acted, arresting SS and Gestapo forces in the city. The German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, rallied the Nazis, and saved the day for Hitler.

In France, the Allies took Normandy and finally Paris on 25 August. In the east, the Russians had advanced almost to the former Polish-Russian border. At this time, Hitler introduced the V-weapons, the V-1 and, later, the V-2, the first rockets used in modern warfare. The V-1 was often intercepted by air pilots, but the V-2 was extremely fast and carried a large payload. However, this advance came too late in the war to have any real effect. The Germans were also on the verge on introducing a number of terrifying new weapons, including advanced jet aircraft, which were too fast for ordinary propeller aircraft, and submarine improvements which would allow the Germans to again fight effectively in the Atlantic. All this came too late to save Hitler. Although a September invasion of The Netherlands failed, the Allies made steady advances. In the winter of 1944, Hitler put everything into one last desperate gamble in the West, known as the Battle of the Bulge, which, despite an initial advance, was a failure, because the introduction of new Allied tanks and low troop numbers among the Germans prevented any real action being taken.

In early February 1945, the three Allied leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, met at newly liberated Yalta in the Crimea in the Soviet Union in the Yalta Conference. Here, they agreed upon a plan to divide post-war Europe. Most of the east went to Stalin, who agreed to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, which he never did. The west went to Britain, France, and the U.S. Post-war Germany would be split between the four, as would Berlin. Here the territory of the Cold War was set. The boundaries of a new Europe, stripped of some of its oldest ruling families, were drawn up by the three men at Yalta.

At the beginning of 1945, Hitler was on his last strings. The Russians launched a devastating attack from Poland, where they had liberated Warsaw, into Germany and Eastern Europe, intending to take Berlin. The Germans collapsed in the West, allowing the Allies to fan out across Germany. However, the Supreme Allied Commander, American general Dwight D. Eisenhower, refused to strike for Berlin, and instead became obsessed with reports of possible guerrilla activity in southern Germany, which in reality existed only in the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. By 25 April, the Russians had besieged Berlin. Hitler remained in the city in a bunker under the Chancellery garden. On 30 April, he committed suicide, after a ritual wedding with his long time mistress Eva Braun. The Germans held out another 7 days under Admiral Doenitz, their new leader, but the Germans surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945, ending the war in Europe (see V-E Day).

Rivalries that had begun during the war, combined with the sense of strength in the victorious powers, laid the foundations of the Iron Curtain and of the Cold War.

The war in the Pacific

The Holocaust

The Holocaust (which roughly means "great fire") was the deliberate, systematic, and horrific murder of millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II by the Nazi regime in Germany. Several differing views exist regarding whether it was intended to occur from the war's beginning, or if the plans for it came about later. Regardless, persecution of Jews extended well before the war even started, such as in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). The Nazis used propaganda to great effect to stir up anti-Semitic feelings within ordinary Germans.

After the conquest of Poland, the Third Reich, which had previously deported Jews and other "undesirables", suddenly had within its borders the largest concentration of Jews in the world. The solution was to round up Jews and place them in concentration camps or in ghettos, cordoned off sections of cities where Jews were forced to live in deplorable conditions, often with tens of thousands starving to death, and the bodies decaying in the streets. As appalling as this sounds, they were the lucky ones. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, armed killing squads of SS men known as Einsatzgruppen systematically rounded up Jews and murdered an estimated one million Jews within the country. As barbaric and inhuman as this seems, it was too slow and inefficient by Nazi standards.

In 1942, the top leadership met in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and began to plan a more efficient way to slaughter the Jews. The Nazis created a system of extermination camps throughout Poland, and began rounding up Jews from the Soviet Union, and from the Ghettos. Not only were Jews shot or gassed to death en masse, but they were forced to provide slave labor and they were used in horrific medical experiments (see Human experimentation in Nazi Germany). Out of the widespread condemnation of the Nazis' medical experiments, the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics was devised.

The Nazis took a sadistic pleasure in the death camps; the entrance to the worst camp, Auschwitz, stated "Arbeit Macht Frei" — "Work Makes Free". In the end, seven million Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and political prisoners were killed by various means, mainly in the death camps. An additional seven million Soviet and other Allied prisoners of war died in camps and holding areas.

There is some controversy over whether ordinary Germans knew about the Holocaust. It appears that many Germans knew about the concentration camps; such things were prominently displayed in magazines and newspapers. In many places, Jews had to walk past towns and villages on their way to work as slaves in German industry. In any case, Allied soldiers reported that the smell of the camps carried for miles. A very small number of people deny the Holocaust occurred entirely, though these claims have been routinely discredited by mainstream historians.

The Nuclear Age begins

During the 1930s, innovations in physics made it apparent that it could be possible to develop nuclear weapons of incredible power using nuclear reactions. When World War II broke out, scientists and advisors among the Allies feared that Nazi Germany may have been trying to develop its own atomic weapons, and the United States and the United Kingdom pooled their efforts in what became known as the Manhattan Project to beat them to it. At the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, scientist Robert Oppenheimer led a team of the world's top scientists to develop the first nuclear weapons, the first of which was tested at the Trinity site in July 1945. However, Germany had surrendered in May 1945, and it had been discovered that the German atomic bomb program had not been very close to success.

The Allied team produced two nuclear weapons for use in the war, one powered by uranium-235 and the other by plutonium as fissionable material, named " Little Boy" and " Fat Man". These were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This, in combination with the Soviet entrance in the war, convinced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. These two weapons remain the only two nuclear weapons ever used against other countries in war.

Nuclear weapons brought an entirely new and terrifying possibility to warfare: a nuclear holocaust. While at first the United States held a monopoly on the production of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, with some assistance from espionage, managed to detonate its first weapon (dubbed " Joe-1" by the West) in August 1949. The post-war relations between the two, which had already been deteriorating, began to rapidly disintegrate. Soon the two were locked in a massive stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The United States began a crash-program to develop the first hydrogen bomb in 1950, and detonated its first thermonuclear weapon in 1952. This new weapon was alone over 400 times as powerful as the weapons used against Japan. The Soviet Union detonated a primitive thermonuclear weapon in 1953 and a full-fledged one in 1955.

The conflict continued to escalate, with the major superpowers developing long-range missiles (such as the ICBM) and a nuclear strategy which guaranteed that any use of the nuclear weapons would be suicide for the attacking nation ( Mutually Assured Destruction). The creation of early warning systems put the control of these weapons into the hands of newly created computers, and they served as a tense backdrop throughout the Cold War.

Since the 1940s there were concerns about the rising proliferation of nuclear weapons to new countries, which was seen as being destabilizing to international relations, spurring regional arms races, and generally increasing the likelihood of some form of nuclear war. Eventually, seven nations would overtly develop nuclear weapons, and still maintain stockpiles today: the United States, the Soviet Union (and later Russia would inherit these), the United Kingdom, France, China, India, and Pakistan. South Africa developed six crude weapons in the 1980s (which it later dismantled), and Israel almost certainly developed nuclear weapons though it never confirmed nor denied it. The creation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1968 was an attempt to curtail such proliferation, but a number of countries developed nuclear weapons since it was signed (and many did not sign it), and a number of other countries, including Libya, Iran, and North Korea, were suspected of having clandestine nuclear weapons programs.

The post-war world

Following World War II, the majority of the industrialized world lay in ruins as a result of aerial bombings, naval bombardment, and protracted land campaigns. The United States was a notable exception to this; barring Pearl Harbour and some minor incidents, the U.S. had suffered no attacks upon its territory. The United States and the Soviet Union, which, despite the devastation of its most populated areas, rebuilt quickly, found themselves the world's two dominant superpowers.

Much of Western Europe was rebuilt after the war with assistance from the Marshall Plan. Germany, chief instigator of the war, was placed under joint military occupation by the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin, although in Soviet-controlled territory, was also divided between the four powers. Occupation of Berlin would continue until 1990. Japan was also placed under U.S. occupation, that would last five years, until 1949. Oddly, these two Axis powers, despite military occupation, soon rose to become the second (Japan) and third (West Germany) most powerful economies in the world.

Following the end of the war, the Allies famously prosecuted numerous German officials for war crimes and other offenses in the Nuremberg Trials. Although Adolf Hitler had committed suicide, many of his cronies, including Hermann Göring, were convicted. Less well-known trials of other Axis officials also occurred, including the Tokyo War Crime Trial.

The failure of the League of Nations to prevent World War II essentially discredited the organization, and it was dissolved. A new attempt at world peace was begun with the founding of the United Nations on 24 October 1945 in San Francisco. Today, nearly all countries are members, but despite its many successes, the organization's success at achieving its goal of world peace is dubious. The organization was never given enough power to overcome the conflicting interests and priorities of its member nations.

The end of empires: decolonization

Almost all of the major nations that were involved in World War II began shedding their overseas colonies soon after the conflict. In Africa, nationalists such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana led their respective nations to independence from foreign rule. The tactics employed by the revolutionaries ranged from non-violent forms of protest to armed rebellions, depending on the nation involved. The United States granted independence to the Philippines, its major Pacific possession. European powers also began withdrawing from their possessions in Africa and Asia. France was forced out of both Indochina and, later, Algeria.

Mutually assured destruction: the Cold War (1947–1991)

This section should be added, and the following (War by proxy) merged into it.

War by proxy

Two wars and a near-war in the 1950s became the foci for capitalist versus communist struggle. The first war was the Korean War, fought between People's Republic of China-backed North Korea and mainly United States-backed South Korea. North Korea's invasion of South Korea led to United Nations intervention. General Douglas MacArthur led troops from the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and other countries in repulsing the Northern invasion. However, the war reached a stalemate after Chinese intervention pushed U.N. forces back, and a cease-fire ended hostilities, leaving the two Koreas divided and tense for the rest of the century.

The second war, the Vietnam War, was perhaps the second most visible war of the 20th century, after World War II. After the French withdrawal from its former colony, Vietnam became partitioned into two halves, much like Korea. Fighting between North and South eventually escalated into a regional war. The United States provided aid to South Vietnam, but was not directly involved until the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed in reaction to a supposed North Vietnamese attack upon American destroyers, brought the U.S. into the war as a belligerent. The war was initially viewed as a fight to contain communism (see containment, Truman Doctrine, and Domino Theory), but, as more Americans were drafted and news of events such as the Tet Offensive and My Lai massacre leaked out, American sentiment turned against the war. U.S. President Richard Nixon was elected partially on claims of a "secret plan" to stop the war. This Nixon Doctrine involved a gradual pullout of American forces; South Vietnamese units were supposed to replace them, backed up by American air power. Unfortunately, the plan went awry, and the war spilled into neighboring Cambodia while South Vietnamese forces were pushed further back. Eventually, the U.S. and North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending U.S. involvement in the war. With the threat of U.S. retaliation gone, the North proceeded to violate the ceasefire and invaded the South with full military force. Saigon was captured on 30 April 1975, and Vietnam was unified under Communist rule a year later, effectively bringing an end to one of the most unpopular wars of all time.

The Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates just how close to the brink of nuclear war the world came during the Cold War. Cuba, under Fidel Castro's socialist government, had formed close ties with the Soviet Union. This was obviously disquieting to the United States, given Cuba's proximity. When Lockheed U-2 spy plane flights over the island revealed that Soviet missile launchers were being installed, U.S. President John F. Kennedy instituted a naval blockade and publicly confronted the Soviet Union. After a tense week, the Soviet Union backed down and ordered the launchers removed, not wanting to risk igniting a new world war.

The space race

With Cold War tensions running high, the Soviet Union and United States took their rivalry to the stars in 1957 with the Soviet launch of Sputnik. A "space race" between the two powers followed. Although the USSR reached several important milestones, such as the first craft on the Moon ( Luna 2) and the first human in space (Yuri Gagarin), the U.S. eventually pulled ahead with its Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, which culminated in Apollo 11's manned landing on the moon. Five more manned landings followed ( Apollo 13 was forced to abort its mission). In addition, both countries launched numerous probes into space, such as the Venera 7 and Voyager 2.

In later decades, space became a somewhat friendlier place. Regular manned space flights were made possible with the American space shuttle, which was the first reusable spacecraft to be successfully used. Mir and Skylab enabled prolonged human habitation in space. In the 1990s, work on the International Space Station began, and by the end of the century, while still incomplete, it was in continual use by astronauts from the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan, and Canada.

The end of the Cold War

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was weakening. The Sino-Soviet split had removed the USSR's most powerful ally, the People's Republic of China. Its arms race with the U.S. was draining the country of funds, and further weakened by internal pressures, ethnic and political. Mikhail Gorbachev, its last leader, attempted to reform the country with glasnost and perestroika, but the formation of Solidarity, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the breaking-off of several Soviet republics, such as Lithuania, started a slippery slope of events that culminated in a coup to overthrow Gorbachev, organized by Communist Party hard-liners. Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, organized mass opposition, and the coup failed. On 26 December 1991, the Soviet Union was officially disbanded into its constituent republics, thus putting a final line under the already exhausted Cold War.

Information and communications technology

The creation of the transistor revolutionized the development of the computer. The first computers, room-sized electro-mechanical devices built to break cryptographical codes during World War II, quickly became at least 20 times smaller using transistors. Computers became reprogrammable rather than fixed-purpose devices. The invention of programming languages meant computer operators could concentrate on problem solving at a high-level, without having to think in terms of the individual instructions to the computer itself. The creation of operating systems also vastly improved programming productivity. Building on this, computer pioneers could now realize what they had envisioned. The graphical user interface, piloted by a computer mouse made it simple to harness the power of the computer. Storage for computer programs progressed from punch cards and paper tape to magnetic tape, floppy disks and hard disks. Core memory and bubble memory fell to random access memory.

The invention of the word processor, spreadsheet and database greatly improved office productivity over the old paper, typewriter and filing cabinet methods. The economic advantage given to businesses led to economic efficiencies in computers themselves. Cost-effective CPUs led to thousands of industrial and home-brew computer designs, many of which became successful; a home-computer boom was led by the Apple II, the ZX80 and the Commodore PET.

IBM, seeking to embrace the microcomputer revolution, devised its IBM Personal Computer (PC). Crucially, IBM developed the PC from third-party components that were available on the open market. The only impediment to another company duplicating the system's architecture was the proprietary BIOS software. Other companies, starting with Compaq, reverse engineered the BIOS and released PC compatible computers that soon became the dominant architecture. Microsoft, which produced the PC's operating system, rode this wave of popularity to become the world's leading software company.

The 1980s heralded the Information Age. The rise of computer applications and data processing made ethereal "information" as valuable as physical commodities. This brought about new concerns surrounding intellectual property issues. The U.S. Government made algorithms patentable, forming the basis of software patents. The controversy over these and proprietary software led Richard Stallman to create the Free Software Foundation and begin the GNU Project.

Computers also became a usable platform for entertainment. Computer games were first developed by software programmers exercising their creativity on large systems at universities, but these efforts became commercially successful in arcade games such as Pong and Space Invaders. Once the home computer market was established, young programmers in their bedrooms became the core of a youthful games industry. In order to take advantage of advancing technology, games consoles were created. Like arcade systems, these machines had custom hardware designed to do game-oriented operations (such as sprites and parallax scrolling) in preference to general purpose computing tasks.

Computer networks appeared in two main styles; the local area network, linking computers in an office or school to each other, and the wide area network, linking the local area networks together. Initially, computers depended on the telephone networks to link to each other, spawning the Bulletin Board sub-culture. However, a DARPA project to create bomb-proof computer networks led to the creation of the Internet, a network of networks. The core of this network was the robust TCP/IP network protocol. Thanks to efforts from Al Gore, the Internet grew beyond its military role when universities and commercial businesses were permitted to connect their networks to it. The main impetus for this was electronic mail, a far faster and convenient form of communication than conventional letter and memo distribution, and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). However, the Internet remained largely unknown to the general public, who were used to Bulletin Boards and services like Compuserve and America Online. This changed when Tim Berners-Lee devised a simpler form of Vannevar Bush's hypertext, which he dubbed the World Wide Web. "The Web" suddenly changed the Internet into a printing press beyond the geographic boundaries of physical countries; it was termed " cyberspace". Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could write pages in the simple HTML format and publish their thoughts to the world.

The Web's immense success also fueled the commercial use of the Internet. Convenient home shopping had been an element of "visions of the future" since the development of the telephone, but now the race was on to provide convenient, interactive consumerism. Companies trading through web sites became known as " dot coms", due to the ".com" suffix of commercial Internet addresses.

European Union

The world at the end of the century

By the end of the century, more technological advances had been made than in all of preceding history. Communications and information technology, transportation technology, and medical advances had radically altered daily lives. Europe appeared to be at a sustainable peace for the first time in recorded history. The people of the Indian subcontinent, a sixth of the world population at the end of the century, had attained an indigenous independence for the first time in centuries. China, an ancient nation comprising a fifth of the world population, was finally open to the world in a new and powerful synthesis of west and east, creating a new state after the near-complete destruction of the old cultural order. With the end of colonialism and the Cold War, nearly a billion people in Africa were left with truly independent new nation states, some cut from whole cloth, standing up after centuries of foreign domination.

The world was undergoing its second major period of globalization; the first, which started in the 18th century, having been terminated by World War I. Since the US was on in a position of almost unchallenged domination, a major part of the process was Americanization. This led to anti-Western and anti-American feelings in parts of the world, especially the Middle East. The influence of China and India was also rising, as the world's largest populations, long marginalized by the West and by their own rulers, were rapidly integrating with the world economy.

However, several problems faced the world. First of all, the gap between rich and poor nations continued to widen. Some said that this problem could not be fixed, that there was a set amount of wealth and it could only be shared by so many. Others said that the powerful nations with large economies were not doing enough to help improve the rapidly evolving economies of the Third World. However, developing countries faced many challenges, including the scale of the task to be surmounted, rapidly growing populations, and the need to protect the environment, and the cost that goes along with it.

Secondly, disease threatened to destabilize many regions of the world. New viruses such as SARS and West Nile continued to spread. In poor nations, malaria and other diseases affected the majority of the population. Millions were infected with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. The virus was becoming an epidemic in southern Africa.

Terrorism, dictatorship, and the spread of nuclear weapons were other issues requiring attention. The world was still blighted by small-scale wars and other violent conflicts, fueled by competition over resources and by ethnic conflicts. Despots such as Kim Jong-il of North Korea continued to lead their nations toward the development of nuclear weapons.

Perhaps most importantly, it was recognized that in the long term, environmental problems threatened the planet's liveability. The most serious was global warming due to human-caused emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. This prompted many nations to negotiate and sign the Kyoto treaty, which set mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

A significant driver of many of many of these problems was overpopulation. At the century's end, the global population was six and a half billion and rising. There was some hope on this score, because the number of children per woman had been decreasing throughout the world, not only in the rich countries. In the long term, it was predicted that the population would probably reach a plateau of nine billion. However, it remained doubtful whether the planet had the long-term capacity to sustain such numbers.

Decades and years

Decades and years 20th century 18th century←19th century← ↔ →21st century→ 22nd century 1890s 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900s 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910s 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920s 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930s 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940s 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950s 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960s 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970s 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980s 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990s 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000s 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Centuries and millennia Millennium Century BC 4th 40th 39th 38th 37th 36th 35th 34th 33rd 32nd 31st 3rd 30th 29th 28th 27th 26th 25th 24th 23rd 22nd 21st 2nd 20th 19th 18th 17th 16th 15th 14th 13th 12th 11th 1st 10th 9th 8th 7th 6th 5th 4th 3rd 2nd 1st AD 1st 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 2nd 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th 3rd 21st 22nd 23rd 24th 25th 26th 27th 28th 29th 30th 4th 31st

Modernism Modernism · Modernity · History · Music · Literature · Poetry · Art · Dance · Architecture  « Romanticism Postmodernism »