Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings

For a complete overview of the most eventful
hundred years in human history, you'll want to read these
companion volumes:

The Century for Young People:
Becoming Modern America: 1901–1936

The Century for Young People:
Defining America: 1936–1961

For our children:
Elizabeth, Christopher, and Jack

If you are one of those people who consider history to be the study of dry and boring facts, please think again. You are in for a surprise when you read these books. Well-told history is as compelling as any great novel or movie. It is full of drama, tension, interesting characters, and fantastic events. That is what you will find here, in this, the history—or should we simply say “story”?—of the twentieth century.

One hundred years may seem like a long time ago, but actually, this is fairly recent history. It is really not too far removed from your life today—and the story of the twentieth century is not just any old story. It is the story of your parents and grandparents, of the world they were born into and the one they helped create. And while some of the events described here happened in faraway places decades ago, you will probably recognize that some things are the way they are now because of what happened then. In other words, this is not only your parents' and grandparents' story; it is your story, too.
One of the most important reasons to study history is to help us understand the present. Think of how old you are today. Now think about your parent or grandparent or even great-grandparent at your age. Without so much as blinking, you can list five things that did not exist in their lifetime. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no automobile, no television, no radio, and certainly no Internet. African Americans in the South lived in segregated communities; few women worked outside the home, and none had the right to vote. So how did we get here from there?

Consider global affairs. When your parents and grandparents were growing up, America's biggest enemy was the Soviet Union, which included modern-day Russia and neighboring countries. From the end of World War II in 1945 until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, America and the Soviet Union often stood nose to nose. In what we now refer to as the Cold War, a nuclear confrontation between the two countries was a persistent threat, though thankfully, one that was never realized.

Today, the Soviet Union is long gone, replaced, in one sense, by America's twenty-first-century enemy: radical factions of the religion of Islam. Yet you will be interested to read about the events of 1979, when rebels inspired by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the long-exiled spiritual leader of Iranian Shiite
Muslims, challenged what he called the decadent West by overthrowing the American-backed Shah of Iran and installing an anti-American regime. Looking back, we can now say that when Khomeini's followers seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 people hostage for 444 days, they gave us a hint of what was to come twenty-some years later: the events of September 11, 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamic terrorism that you live with today. If you were a small child on September 11, 2001 (or not yet born), that date may seem like just another landmark in our history. But for many others, it is the defining moment of the twenty-first century,
their
twenty-first century. These books will help you understand this and other world-shattering events that shaped our lives.

Another way to think of history is to say that it is the study of change. Consider this: the adolescents of the early 1900s were not referred to as teenagers—the word wasn't even used until 1941—and as late as 1920, children were unlikely to finish, and often even to start, high school. Teens were needed to work the farms in what was still largely an agricultural society. Certainly no one would have imagined that there could be such a thing as a distinct teen culture. The rise of popular music, which came with the phonograph and then the radio, made such a culture possible. So did urbanization, industrialization, and prosperity, which by the 1950s
gave families the luxury to let young people stay in school longer, maybe even go to college, and to be “teenagers.”

Technology has always been among the biggest agents of change, and as the story of the twentieth century shows, it can introduce itself unexpectedly. When Henry Ford built the first affordable cars in the United States, he imagined that he was creating a machine that would enhance rural life. The first Model Ts had the potential to double as farm tractors. But in the end the automobile had the opposite effect: once people could get into their Fords and travel, they could see worlds that had long been beyond them, and so a kind of new mobility entered American life, with children growing up and moving far away to pursue lives wholly different from those of their parents. Similarly, the first computers—room-sized behemoths created in the late 1940s—were designed almost exclusively as tools for the scientific community, not as the research, communication, and entertainment platforms we consider them today. It was not until the early 1980s that most people had computers in their offices and homes.

The technological, intellectual, and commercial explosions that greeted the twentieth century made many people dream of a day when a permanent harmony would descend over the globe, but sadly, that was not to be. In fact, if there was one common teenage experience the world over, it was that most
ancient of human activities, war. Beginning in 1914, large armies in Europe engaged in horrific battle. People called that first global conflict the Great War, thinking that it would be the last such battle in human history. Now we call it World War I, followed as it was by World War II, just twenty years later, and by the persistent late-twentieth-century (and now early-twenty-first-century) fears that we were (or are) on the brink of World War III.

More than nine million people, much of Europe's youth, died in the Great War alone. But as you contemplate such numbing numbers, it may be more powerful to think not just about how many lives were lost, but also about whose lives were lost. If there had been no war in 1914, maybe one of those who died would have grown up to be a scientist who discovered a cure for cancer or a humanitarian who solved the world's hunger problem. Maybe Germans, absent the humiliation of defeat, would never have listened to the perverse racist message of Adolf Hitler, who led that country into the nightmare that could be stopped only by an even greater war that killed even more people. Many historians are now convinced that had there been no World War I, there would likely have been no World War II and no Cold War, for each, it seems, led inevitably to the next.

With all its wars and devastation, the twentieth century may seem like a bleak episode, a sad study. But as you continue your journey through these three
volumes, hold that thought. Loud and sensational events always mask slower, deeper trends, and in the twentieth century the more gradual and less sensational changes mark a time of glorious achievement.

Because the forces of liberty did win that protracted battle between East and West, there are more people living in free and democratic societies today than at any time in human history. In our own country, freedom was extended to millions who had long been denied it by persistent traditions of racial, gender, and ethnic discrimination. Only after defeating Hitler were the American armed forces, in 1948, desegregated.

Science produced new weapons of frightening magnitude in the twentieth century, but it also found ways to erase disease and prolong life. Perhaps the century's most significant change is represented by this fact: if you had been born in 1905, you could expect to live only forty-nine years. By contrast, babies born in America today, as you read this, will likely live to seventy-eight, and some—many, in fact—will live to see the twenty-second century.

In a century when it sometimes seemed that some life-changing innovation was being introduced every week, there were also many remarkable acts of human will by people who, stuck in situations that seemed utterly hopeless, found the courage to ask “why?” The twentieth century produced so many more heroes than villains, people
like Thomas Edison and Bill Gates, Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks, George Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr., and it no doubt produced many more who never became famous, who moved quietly, even silently, behind the drama to make life better. They pushed for justice and beauty and good and not only asked “why?” but, thinking of how things could be made better, also asked “why not?” I hope all of you reading this book will emerge inspired by their example. As my colleague Peter Jennings used to write when signing the original edition of
The Century for Young People
, “The next century is yours.” To that, I would add a challenge: “Make your mark on it.”

—Todd Brewster

Marnie Muller, who was born in 1942, was one of the willing volunteers in the early years of the Peace Corps.

W
hen Kennedy was elected there was definitely a feeling that he was going to somehow lead the country in a different way. He was young and handsome, and he talked a language that I could understand. When he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” it struck a very profound chord in
me. I was a junior in college when he announced the formation of the Peace Corps, and I immediately thought, “I'm going to get an application, and I'm going to join this Peace Corps.” I was going to go and help the poor people of the world do something better with their lives. The idea was to go there and help people to help themselves.

I was assigned to an extremely poor barrio on the northern side of Guayaqil [a city in Ecuador], on a very picturesque hill, full of cane shacks. The running water only went up to a certain place on the hill. Beyond that, water had to be carried in buckets up to people's houses. Many of the houses had dirt floors, and none of them had windows. There were holes in the roofs. There was garbage and sewage overflowing down the hill. It was a pretty big shock to me. My job was to organize activities for a new community center, which was built by previous volunteers. You have to understand, I was a twenty-one-year-old girl. I not only had to live in a very rough-and-tumble community, but I then had to try and work some miracle within the community. I was alternately thrilled, moved, excited, terrified, and filled with the desire to go home.

We had a library in the community center. We had mechanics classes in there. We organized football teams for the boys to
play. Whatever the community wanted, we developed. Out of that grew more serious projects such as a preschool. Out of the sewing classes grew an economic development project where the women made mosquito nets and sold them to CARE to make money. On the one hand, I was very accepted in the community. On the other hand, whenever you're a First World person working in the Third World, there is always a certain anger and resentment toward you.

Out of the activities at the center grew a notion that the community could begin to demand bigger, more fundamental changes. And when we began to deal with the true needs of the community, we got into some trouble. One of the first indications that something was wrong occurred at a party I threw at my house. The president of the Small Business Organization pulled me aside and pointed to somebody in the room and said, “What is he doing here? He's a Communist.” And then sometime after that, when the people in the community marched on the
municipio
, the city government, to demand a new sewage system, the money for the center disappeared. Then the U.S. ambassador called me in and warned me not to enter into the politics of the country.

Many of us suspected that there was
something else going on, that there was another purpose for our being there that we weren't told about. There was something wrong with young, inexperienced kids coming like gangbusters into these Third World communities as though we knew everything about the world—as though we knew how to help these poor people. There was a certain arrogance about our being there, and it was very disturbing for us to find that out.