20TH CENTURY: A TIME FOR CHANGES

Political facts Cultural Movements

& Art
1901 Queen Victoria’s death Post-Victorian era
King Edward VII Edwardian Times
- Art Nouveau
- Expressionism
1914 First World War Modernism
– The League of Nations - Dada
1918
1917 The Russian Revolution - Cubism
Communism
1920s The Roaring Twenties The Flappers’ Movement
The jazz age
-Art Deco
- Surrealism
1930s The Rise of Dictatorships Modernism’s second generation
Franco in Spain
Mussolini in Italy
Hitler in Germany
1939 The Second World War - Degenerate Art
– The United Nations
1945 The Holocaust
1950s The nuclear Age
Cold War - Abstract Expressionism
War by proxy - Pop Art
The Space Race
1980s The Glasnost Post-Modernism
The Fall of Berlin’s Wall
1990s Disintegration of the USSR
European Union
2000 International Terrorism – the attack on the
Twin Towers – the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq
2009 Barak Obama, the 1st Afro-American
President of USA

The twentieth century was a period of radical departure in the way almost every
human activity had been done in the past. These changes affected almost every field:
Politics, Economy, Science, Arts, etc., and they transformed the world in those hundred
years more than any time in the past.
 It was a century that started with steam powered ships as the most sophisticated
means of transport, and ended with the space shuttle. Horses, humanity's basic form of
personal transportation for thousands of years were replaced by automobiles within the
span of a few decades.
The twentieth 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 10 year period following World
War I than the sum total of new technological development in any previous century.
Terms like ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage
and became an influence on the lives of everyday people.
War reached an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication; in the Second
World War, approximately 57 million people died, mainly due to massive improvements in
weaponry.
The trends of mechanization of goods and services and networks of global
communication, which were begun in the 19th century, continued at an ever-increasing
pace in the 20th.
In spite of the terror and chaos, the 20th century saw many attempts at world peace.
Virtually every aspect of life in virtually every human society changed in some
fundamental way or another during the twentieth century and for the first time, any
individual could influence the course of history no matter their background. Arguably, the
20th century re-shaped the face of the planet in more ways than any previous century.
Scientific discoveries such as relativity and quantum physics radically changed the
worldview of scientists, causing them to realize that the universe was much more complex
than they had previously believed, and dashing the hopes at the end of the preceding
century that the last few details of knowledge were about to be filled in.