20th century
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s
Formally the twentieth century comprises the years 1901-2000. In common usage the 20th century comprises the years 1900-1999.
The twentieth century was remarkable due to the technological, medical, social, ideological, and international innovations, and due to the rise of war, genocide, and democide on an unprecedented scale. Virtually every aspect of human life had changed in some fundamental way by the end of the twentieth century.
Important developments, events and achievements
- Science and Technology
- Assembly line and mass production of motor vehicles and other goods
- Development of agricultural chemicals
- Invention of heavier-than-air flying machines, jet engine
- Space flight and lunar landings
- Invention of transistor, integrated circuit, laser and computers.
- Radio and television
- Global real-time communications via geosynchronous satellites
- Internet
- Theory of relativity and the big bang model of cosmology
- Quantum mechanics and the standard model of elementary particles
- Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl
- Antibiotics
- Discovery of DNA molecule, advent of molecular biology
- Wars and Politics
- World War I
- Founding of the League of Nations
- World War II
- Holocaust
- Korean War
- Forming of socialist countries
- Cold_war
- Rise and fall of Soviet Union
- Vietnam War
- Middle East turmoil, OPEC and oil prices, Gulf War
- Beginnings of terrorism, hijackings, Black September, 1972 Munich Olympic games
- Women's rights
- End of colonialism
- Founding of the United Nations
- Disasters
- Influenza pandemic 1918 kills 25 million
- AIDS
- Culture
- Environmental Problems or perceived problems
- Vast increase in fossil fuel consumption, Air Pollution, Ozone hole
- Global warming
- World-wide deforestation
- Loss of biodiversity (plant, animal species)
Significant persons
- Neil Armstrong
- Yuri Gagarin
- Albert Einstein
- Neville Chamberlain
- Winston Churchill
- Margaret Thatcher
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Richard Nixon
- Ronald Reagan
- Vladimir Lenin
- Joseph Stalin
- Nikita Kruschev
- Leonid Brezhnev
- Mikhail Gorbachev
- Adolf Hitler
- Pol Pot
- Mao Zedong
- Abdul Nasser
- Anwar Sadat
- David Ben-Gurion
- Golda Meir
- Menachem Begin
- Hafez el Assad
- Czar Nicholas II
- Grigory Rasputin
- Kaiser Wilhelm
- Archduke Franz Ferdinand
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Charles Lindberg