World in the Long Twentieth Century: An Interpretive History

by Edward Ross Dickinson

What can be called the long twentieth century represents the most miraculous and creative era in human history. It was also the most destructive. Over the past 150 years, modern societies across the globe have passed through an extraordinary and completely unprecedented transformation rooted in the technological developments of the nineteenth century. The World in the Long Twentieth Century lays out a framework for understanding the fundamental factors that have shaped our world on a truly global scale, analyzing the historical trends, causes, and consequences of the key forces at work. Spanning the 1870s to the present, this book explores the making of the modern world as a connected pattern of global developments. Students will learn to think about the past two centuries as a process, a series of political and economic upheavals, technological advances, and environmental transformations that have shaped the  long  twentieth century.

Genres: History

386 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2018

Reviews

[Hugolane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you looking for a textbook that exposes college students to dramatic changes that have happened in the world since roughly 1850? This may be the book you are looking for. I have been teaching a course called The World Since 1815 for much of the past decade and have been frustrated by the available texts because of cost and the narrative. Textbook cost of course is standard problem in the early 21st century, but the available texts were either too focused on the twentieth century or the tail end of extensive World History surveys that fit awkwardly in a class full of students who knew nothing of what happened before 1750. Dickinson offers a solution. This is not another survey that spends a paragraph or two here on an event in one place followed by an analogous example on another continent. His focus is big picture with a first chapter that focuses on the massive changes in demographics -- population growth and immigration -- that took place in the course of the 19th C. Of course, he provides examples along the way, but they are manageable. As he talks about natural resource exploitation he uses Herbert Hoover as an example of the international nature of late 19th C mining and pairs him effectively with the IWW activist William "Big Bill" Haywood. And the first 4 chapters of the book are efforts to provide a general understanding of the major trends that then come to a head at the beginning of the 20th Century organized thematically. Chapters 5-10 are somewhat more conventional in as much as the big political, economic, and cultural events are discussed, but they too avoid getting too caught up in the conventional conglomerate narratives done finds in Western Civ and standard World History texts. Themes dominate even here so for example his discussion of World War II highlights the importance of fossil fuels in a way that puts that closer to the center of the narrative, and that central concern carries on in the next chapters. I loved the book the moment I began reading it, but just as importantly my students seem to have appreciated it as well, no doubt in part because instead of seeming to have different priorities from the textbook readings, or only tangentially connected, the chapters and lectures were more clearly connected.

[Calliope100 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish I had read this ten years ago.