The World in the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Black, Jeremy

3.5

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780582472846: The World in the Twentieth Century

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0582472849 ISBN 13: 9780582472846

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

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From this major author comes a totally unique history of the twentieth century. Eschewing the traditional model for histories of this kind – blow-by-blow political narratives typically overloaded with detail - Jeremy Black offers us instead a brilliant thematic account of the last 100 years with the environment and the continuing strength of religious belief at its centre.

Looking back to the 1910s and 1920s, Black begins with "the greatest issue of all" – the natural environment and its destruction, and moves to show how our world been transformed by urbanisation and development. Amazing developments took place across the century: men walked on the moon, the internet revolutionised communications; advances in health and medicine; developments in manufacturing and technology; economic globalization – all have changed the way different parts of the world related to each other. How have these revolutionary changes impacted on religion and politics?

In the final sections of the book, Black looks at the persistence and growing extremism in religious belief, how change creates instability and wars, and how power blocs emerged and collapsed in response to all these developments. This is twentieth century world history on a truly global scale. The Twentieth Century World forces us to rethink the way we view the past, and offers us a new way to understand the present.

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From the Back Cover:

THE WORLD IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

`A stimulating review of the hundred years which saw the greatest changes in the world�s history. Jostling with the huge political changes are like expectancy, hunger, travel, urbanisation, ethnicity, fanaticism, stem cell research, pollution, and globalisation. To face the challenges of the future we must understand the changes of the past and this book by Jeremy Black makes you reflect, think reconsider, appreciate and understand.�

Rt Hon Lord Baker of Dorking

"As one would expect from Jeremy Black, this is a masterly, synoptic study - global in reach; cultural, social, economic and political in scope; an example of the historian as renaissance man of letters."

Oliver Letwin

This provocative history of the twentieth century, our age, dares to take a new approach. Eshewing the standard political history of the West, Jeremy Black points up the deeper issues of the century and those which will surely determine our path in the twenty first: belief, race, gender, technology and the environment. At the same time, there is a determined engagement with other continents, especially Asia and Africa. At this crucial turning point in history, the compelling new perspectives offered by `The World in the Twentieth Century� could not be more topical.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of numerous books including `War� (2000) `The Atlas of World History� (1999) `A History of the British Isles� (1997).

About the Author:

Jeremy Black is the editor of the Dorling Kindersley Atlas of World History and has over 30 single authored books to his name and more than 100 edited works. He has also been involved in several productions for radio and TV. His Modern British History (Macmillan 2000) has shown how a successful history of part of the modern world that does not focus on political history can be produced.

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