Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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chunk of the 20th century presents the problem amply, with its abundance of wars, villains, scientific miracles, remappings of the earth. Six decades of speeches, treaties, books, bombs, pills, screams and rockets. What will have mattered in the long run? And what does "mattered" mean? There is the fact, and the idea, and the person who has the idea...
...cultural truism that by the time a major idea is expressed, it has long been thought but unexpressed. Many years before 1941 the 20th century could have been aptly labeled American. This would not necessarily have had to do with American predominance or even with American significance, since before its entry into the first World War, the nation had been largely preoccupied with its own development. Still, the fundamental idea that America represented corresponded to the values of the times. America was not merely free; it was freed, unshackled. The image was that of something previously held in check...
...Yeats foresaw a Second Coming not long before 1923, in which the world would be devoured by a "rough beast." Yet the impulse was not necessarily anarchic, although things could turn out that way. It was the dream of self-fulfillment. As a goal, self-fulfillment was hardly the 20th century's invention. The European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours. But in the 19th century there were still...
...world's largest city last week, toward the middle of the 20th Century after Christ, five years after the Great Blitz, an eight-year-old boy was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Said London's child: "Alive...
What makes Viet Nam: A Television History effective is less its grand scale than its telling detail. The opening hour, which concentrates on France's century of colonial control, offers chilling hints of why the Vietnamese nationalists were so implacable: in the first years of the 20th century, postcards of severed Vietnamese heads were mailed by French soldiers to their sweethearts; some 2 million Vietnamese died of starvation during and after World War II. The narrative recalls that North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh collaborated at the end of that war with U.S. intelligence agents and modeled Viet...