Advanced History

Era guide, 1900 to 2000

The twentieth century: timeline and study guide

The twentieth century brought two world wars, the rise and fall of European empires, a long Cold War between superpowers and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Timeline of the twentieth century

The twentieth century, 1900 to 2000
  1. First World War1914 to 1918
  2. Russian Revolution1917
  3. Great Depressionc. 1929 to 1939
  4. Second World War1939 to 1945
  5. United Nations founded1945
  6. Cold War1947 to 1991
  7. Indian independence1947
  8. People’s Republic of China1949
  9. Korean War1950 to 1953
  10. Ghana independent1957
  11. Cuban Missile Crisis1962
  12. Apollo 11 Moon landing1969
  13. Soviet Union dissolved1991
  14. Berlin Wall falls1989

On a small screen, swipe the timeline sideways to see all of it.

How to approach the century

There is so much evidence for the twentieth century that the challenge is selection. Most courses organize it around a few large processes: total war, revolution and ideology, the end of empires, the Cold War, and economic and technological change. Learn the anchor dates on the timeline, then study how these processes overlapped. This guide stops at 2000, since recent decades are still being argued over as current politics.

The world wars

The First World War (1914 to 1918) began after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo. It brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. The peace treaties of 1919, including the Treaty of Versailles, redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East.

The Second World War (1939 to 1945) began in Europe with Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939; in East Asia, war between Japan and China had begun in 1937. Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust, the systematic murder of about six million European Jews, along with millions of other victims. The war ended in Europe in May 1945 and in Asia in August and September 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Cold War

After 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union led rival blocs. They never fought each other directly, but competed through alliances, an arms race, the space race and wars in places such as Korea and Vietnam. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought them close to nuclear war. The Cold War ended as communist governments in Eastern Europe fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.

Decolonization

Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, most colonies in Asia and Africa became independent states. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, with a partition that caused mass violence and displacement. Ghana became independent in 1957, and many more African states followed in the 1960s. Some transitions were negotiated, while others, such as in Algeria, came after long wars.

Themes that run through the era

  • Ideology: liberal democracy, communism and fascism competed for support.
  • Rights movements: campaigns for women's suffrage, civil rights in the United States and an end to apartheid in South Africa.
  • Technology and economy: mass production, cars, radio and television, antibiotics, computers and the Green Revolution in agriculture.

Sources and how we know

Film, radio, photographs, opinion polls and oral history interviews join written records. Propaganda is a major source type in this period: ask who produced it, for whom, and what it wanted the audience to do. Some government archives remain closed or were opened only after 1991, which is one reason interpretations of the Cold War keep changing.

Practice questions

  • Evaluate the relative importance of the causes of the First World War.
  • Compare the decolonization of India with that of one African state.
  • To what extent was the Cold War a conflict about ideology?

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