Word: 20th
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Perhaps, as the 20th century draws to a close, the quest for identity is best fulfilled not by finding a coherent sense of self but by discovering that everyone else is just as dysfunctional as you are--and that it's okay...
...larger culture, Levitt's achievement was contested ground. Levittown entered 20th century folklore as the place where democratic equality edged into an unnerving conformity. By stamping whole townships onto old farmland, Levitt brought the machine into the garden in a very literal way. Unlike the automobile or the radio, the home was an ancient possession, a thing too intimate to be mass-produced without offending notions of Yankee individuality that were already under intense pressure from modernity. And as Levittown matured, suburbia itself began to look like humanity at room temperature, a place where the true countryside was denatured, while...
...better personified the vitality of the American Dream in the second half of the 20th century than Sam Walton. A scrappy, sharp-eyed bantam rooster of a boy, Walton grew up in the Depression dust bowl of Oklahoma and Missouri, where he showed early signs of powerful ambition: Eagle Scout at an improbably young age and quarterback of the Missouri state-champion high school football team. He earned money to help his struggling family by throwing newspapers and selling milk from the cow. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he served in the Army during World War II. Then...
...main reason living standards have improved so much in the 20th century is that businesses have become so much more productive. And it is managers who have helped drive that evolution. The great ones do more than just run things efficiently; they develop and put into practice ideas that transcend their company, their industry, even their national borders. Their ideas survive to become vocabulary in the halls of management and often in society at large...
...first glance, the business world of the 20th century would not seem a propitious breeding ground for eccentricity. Businessmen and -women, in the main, pride themselves on probity, predictability. "Sober" and "well-rounded" are considered compliments. Little wonder, then, that a hectare of executives contains fewer kooks than just about any other sampling of humanity. Compared with poets and philosophers, bankers and industrialists have been relatively late adopters of berets, ferrets and home brewing. Yet, even so, the century has hatched its share of "true originals"--some of whom won fame and fortune, others who left only a gaudy afterglow...