Word: 20th
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...beginning of a new historical epoch. All the forces that had made the 20th century such a violent disappointment to idealists--totalitarianism, the gigantic state, the crushing of individual choice and initiative--were publicly and spectacularly defeated. Ascendant instead were the values that Thatcher had supported in the face of sometimes spectacular opposition: free markets and free minds. The world enters the 21st century and the 3rd millennium a wiser place, owing in no small part to the daughter of a small shopkeeper, who proved that nothing is more effective than willpower allied to a few clear, simple and workable...
SOURCES: HAMMOND'S ATLAS OF THE 20TH CENTURY; THE TIMETABLES OF HISTORY; OUR TIMES, THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY; THE PEOPLE'S CHRONOLOGY; WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE
Lech Walesa, the fly, feisty, mustachioed electrician from Gdansk, shaped the 20th century as the leader of the Solidarity movement that led the Poles out of communism. It is one of history's great ironies that the nearest thing we have ever seen to a genuine workers' revolution was directed against a so-called workers' state. Poland was again the icebreaker for the rest of Central Europe in the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. Walesa's contribution to the end of communism in Europe, and hence the end of the cold war, stands beside those of his fellow Pole, Pope John...
TIME's list of the 20 most important "leaders and revolutionaries" of the 20th century contains only three women, or 15% of the total. Expressed as a grade, this is an F-, so that if history were a classroom, women would have to take the 20th century over again. Naturally, my first response was to demand a recount. Where, for example, are the feminist revolutionaries--the Betty Friedans, the Sylvia Pankhursts, the Simone de Beauvoirs? Yes, I know there are still four more categories and 80 more names to go, but it's a pretty boyish definition of revolution that...
...years, much of the world's female population has been voteless, voiceless, illiterate, ground down by toil and sexist restrictions. When I griped to my daughter about the shortage of our kind among the top 20 leaders, she sighed at my paleofeminist pique: "But, Mom, it's just the 20th century. You know, the bad old days...