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The Century
"We have sought," write Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, "to distinguish our story from other histories by holding each chapter up to a litmus test: Have we looked at this time from the perspective of someone who lived through it? And in doing so, have we captured a sense not only of the events of a particular era, but of the mood, the prevailing attitudes?" Thus, the experiences of ordinary men and women come to life in sidebars that appear throughout The Century. Sharpe James, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, recalls the sense of excitement and possibility he felt when Jackie Robinson became the first black ballplayer in the major leagues. Gilles Ryan remembers what it was like to be a high-school student in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes Trial. Connie Chang talks about emigrating to the United States from Korea and establishing a liquor store in Los Angeles, only to have it destroyed in the civil unrest.
Comparisons to Harold Evans's The American Century are, perhaps, inevitable, but in addition to the emphasis on ordinary lives, The Century is further distinguished by the effective use of color photography (as well as several black-and-white shots). The book's sweeping narrative, shaped by Jennings and Brewster's comprehensive text, also flows a bit more smoothly than Evans's telegraphic prose; one can almost imagine Jennings reciting from these pages as he hosts the ABC/History Channel documentaries to which this book is a companion piece.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published November 10, 1998
23 people are currently reading
463 people want to read
About the author
Peter Jennings
44 books7 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM was a Canadian-American journalist and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer. A high-school dropout, he transformed himself into one of television's most prominent journalists.
Jennings started his career early, hosting a Canadian radio show at the age of nine. In 1965, ABC News tapped him to anchor its flagship evening news program. His inexperience marred his first short stint in the anchor chair, and Jennings became a foreign correspondent in 1968, honing his reporting skills in the Middle East.
He returned as one of World News Tonight's three anchors in 1978, and was promoted to the role of sole anchor in 1983. Jennings formed part of the "Big Three" news anchors who dominated American evening news in the 1980s and 1990s. Having always been fascinated with the United States, Jennings became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States in 2003. His death, which closely followed the retirements of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, marked the end of the "Big Three" era.
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM was a Canadian-American journalist and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer. A high-school dropout, he transformed himself into one of television's most prominent journalists.
Jennings started his career early, hosting a Canadian radio show at the age of nine. In 1965, ABC News tapped him to anchor its flagship evening news program. His inexperience marred his first short stint in the anchor chair, and Jennings became a foreign correspondent in 1968, honing his reporting skills in the Middle East.
He returned as one of World News Tonight's three anchors in 1978, and was promoted to the role of sole anchor in 1983. Jennings formed part of the "Big Three" news anchors who dominated American evening news in the 1980s and 1990s. Having always been fascinated with the United States, Jennings became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States in 2003. His death, which closely followed the retirements of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, marked the end of the "Big Three" era.
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November 18, 2014
I received this book as a Christmas present from my parents in 1999. With six days to go before the `end of the century' I crammed in the entire book in under a week so I could experience the twentieth century right before it went away. After that I put the book aside and had not opened it again since my senior year of high school. However with the twentieth century over a decade in the past I decided to open it up again and reexamine the time period that gave to us antibiotics, Hitler, computers, and practiced communism.
In his classical story Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving tried to demonstrate how life in America rapidly changes. If a man went to sleep for thirty years he would wake up to find the world unrecognizable. In the twentieth century you don't have to do a story where a man skips thirty years, if you missed five straight weeks you would be struggling to catch up. As each year passed, society rolled out a new piece of technology often changing life as we know it.
"The change was sudden and dramatic, and how could it not be? The automobile was, after all, the first significant improvement in self-guided transportation since the bicycle (which, after its introduction in 1839, had a similarly dramatic effect upon the nineteenth century). And by the time it became widely available to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the car had already begun to redefine nearly every facet of life.
The burgeoning automobile age established a new since of freedom and individuality: people no longer had to make their plans according to train schedules, and they traveled not with hundreds of strangers, but by themselves or with family and friends. At the same time, it also established a new, wider sense of community: small towns and villages that existed miles away from anyplace else were now connected to each other by roads, granting people who had long lived in isolation the opportunity to enjoy up-to-date medical care, higher-quality education, and whatever else lay `down the road.'" (p.103)
One of the biggest mistakes of the twentieth century was the establishment of prohibition. It was supported across the political spectrum by people who were foolish enough to believe that you can change bad personal behavior by simply making said behavior illegal. Prohibition only succeeded in making drinking less public, led to a major crime wave, and wasted lots of money. Unfortunately prohibition goes on today, just not with alcohol, but in this new madness called the drug war waged by over-budgeted vice squads.
"One cause that united both minister and Klansmen was the Eighteenth Amendment. The movement to ban the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages had once been led by Progressives, who cited growing studies showing the medical risks of heavy drinking and alcohol's destructive influence on marriage and family. But by the time Prohibition was enacted, its driving force was puritan, who hoped it would beat back the forces loosing modern morals, and the nativist, who saw it as a way of rejecting the wine-drinking immigrants of southern Europe. Of course, it did neither." (p. 119)
This book also allowed me to once again appreciate the accomplishment of Charles Lindbergh, despite that the guy personally was giant rat dressed as a man; he was one hell of an aviator.
"By the mid-1920s, the airplane seemed to have more potential as a circus act than it did as a vehicle for transportation. Carnivals and county fairs featured daredevil riders performing stunts like wing-walking and parachute jumping, and spectators bought rides at five dollars a thrill. Barnstorming pilots, evangelists for aviation's future, hopped from airfield to airfield, moving without maps, going as far as their gas supplies would take them, gathering circus crowds whenever they were alit. But while people everywhere found the flying machines interesting, the general mood was one of `you'll never get me up in one of those things.' Then came Lindy." (p.136)
Nothing would alter the world more than the most awful events of the twentieth century: World War II and the Holocaust. Both the events and their aftermath would transform the direction of the human race, and the one who brought both these things about was tyrant Adolph Hitler. Because this man lived millions would die as he succeeded in brainwashing a nation.
"Early in his career, Hitler had discovered that he had an extraordinary talent for the kind of oratory that would appeal directly to such feelings, and once the moment of public vulnerability arrived he exploited it to the fullest. In speeches that often ran two hours or longer, he would hold a crowd of up to half a million spellbound, taking time first to warm up and sense the mood of his audience, then diving in to do his work. Sweating profusely, shaking with fury, he would build the attitude of his listeners into a frenzy, playing with an assortment of techniques that would make them first laugh, then cry, then explode in a fit of rage." (p.168)
While there was a worldwide depression going on and mad men rising to power life still went on, and before Facebook, World Wide Web and cable television (or any television) there was Life magazine capturing the world in some of its greatest and not so great moments.
"Among the places the New Deal pictures appeared was a fresh new photo magazine called Life. Started in 1936 by Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life was an instant success. The mere idea of a photo magazine was so exciting to thirties' readers, it inspired more than a quarter million of them to buy subscriptions even before the first issue had been published. And once Life hit the newsstands, its popularity rose so quickly, Luce nearly killed it when he couldn't raise advertising rates fast enough to pay for the magazine's skyrocketing circulation." (p.192)
One of my favorite aspects of this book is the articles that were written by various people who were at major historic events or were just aware they were living in unique times. The one written by Karla Stept about the German takeover in Austria is especially powerful.
"All of this was a complete shock to us, because we had never heard of things like this happening in Germany. And we found out later on, they never did happen there. It was an Austrian specialty. What took five years to accomplish in Germany took them only twenty-four hours in Austria. One should not forget that. For five years in Germany they had worked up to this by adding one thing to the next. In, Austria they did it in just one day. The Germans had to learn to be anti-Semitic. The Austrians always were. They must have harbored all that rage for hundreds of years. And now suddenly they were free to express it." (p.200)
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a world that was ruled by Europe but by the century's midpoint that was coming to fast end. The great European empires were stretched out financially, physically, and morally. In the modern world it was not going to be acceptable for people to be governed by governments thousands of miles away, who were given little to know say on how it was conducted.
"One of the most far-reaching consequences of the Second World War was the abrupt end that it brought to colonization. The finish came at the urging of the United States, which had long argued that colonial empires were inconsistent with its belief in democracy, and at the expense of the crippled European powers, particularly Britain, whose rule had dominated the map for centuries. But the change was inevitable: if they had done nothing else, the century's wars had confirmed the legitimacy of the dusty old order and its subjugation of the masses (though the surge in the world's population would probably have forced the issue if war had not). Even the Moscow-led Communist insurgencies, seizing power sometimes with little popular support, cynically claimed the mantel of democracy." (p.308)
The automobile changed the way people traveled the television changed the way people stayed home. You could listen to radio and work, television involved your most important sense: sight. People now had a window to the world in their living room.
"There were something irresistible about television, and while few understood just how important it would become (more a new environment than a new mass medium, as inescapable as the weather, wrote Richard Reeves), they wanted to there when it took off. In the medium's early years there was Howdy Doody and the World Series, but only when the rectangular cathode-ray tube was perfected in 1950 and the price of the average DuMont and Philco dropped to $200 in 1953 did the age of television truly descend upon the nation. By 1960 more than 45 million television sets found homes, not only in the suburbs, where their elaborate wood cabinets fit quite nicely into the family room or the den, but also in the inner-city taverns (where bartenders complained that patrons spent too much time watching and not enough time drinking.)" (p. 331)
With television's rise came a new kind of media celebrity. Now not only would people's work be famous but also their image. America had always had celebrities, you can say our first was Ben Franklin, but now the celebrity's image was burned into public retinas. It would give some people everlasting fame, but they would never be normal again.
"Elvis Presley was one of two mass media figures who came of age in the fifties. The other is Marilyn Monroe. That the age of television should have produced one of the biggest movie stars in history would seem to be a paradox, but just as Elvis was more than just a musician, Marilyn was more than a movie star. She was Marilyn, the object of mid-century wish fulfillment for men, of envy for women, and of fascination for quite nearly everyone with eyes." (p.346)
Just as the colonial empires were falling apart internationally, at home, a new revolutionary movement was starting that would tear down the system of Jim Crow and challenge the very public consciousness to the injustice that nation had let go on for centuries. The legacy of the movement still battles on today.
"To be alive in the sixties was to feel exhilarated, present, not necessarily happy but at least fiercely awake. To be young in the sixties was to be all this and more. Along with the `consciousness-raising' and pleasure (particularly sexual pleasure, freed from the fear of pregnancy when the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill in 1960), the sixties glorified youth and freedom; the years also maligned old age and tradition, discipline, and conformity that had been the hallmark of the most recent decade." (p.370)
John F. Kennedy, the second youngest president and the youngest elected, took office on January 20, 1961 and arrived like a breath of fresh air. Kennedy had an energetic presidency that created the P.E.A.C.E. Corps and challenged the nation to go to the moon. He had his setbacks such as the Bay of Pigs disaster and the late response to the Civil Rights Movement, however his greatest hour occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he got the Russians to take the missiles out of Cuba. The nation was traumatized when the President was taken from them, on television.
"Anyone alive and aware on November 22, 1963, when the news from Dallas arrived across the radios, television, and phone lines, in the form of frantic voices of neighbors calling over suburban lawns and the somber tones of tearful school principals speaking to their students from loudspeakers, remembers in sharp detail where they were and what they were doing. More interesting is those who can recall what they felt. For most, the information stuck like a poisoned tipped dagger, delivering to they system equal amounts of grief and disbelief." (p.384)
Kennedy didn't live to see his moon landing, but it happened before the end of that decade. For years some cultures had worshiped the moon, and everyone has looked at it. It was Neil Armstrong however, who walked on it and stuck our flag in it.
"Still, like Lindbergh's feat in the twenties, the astronauts' mission had provided a balm for the pain of their own crazy decade, perhaps most importantly in the views their lunar camera captured when they were directed back towards earth. At home, mo matter where you stood, the sixties looked messy and unreadable, like a painting viewed too close to make out anything but the texture of the brush strokes and the smudge of color. Yet from out there, in the dark eternity of the universe, the planet projected a picture of harmony, an essential beautiful orb, ordered and still." (p.419)
America saw one president murdered on TV, and then they saw a second one fall. Richard M. Nixon had been a major figure in politics since the late forties, served in the House, Senate, and as Vice President to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After losing the presidency to Kennedy in 1960, then the California governorship to Pat Brown in 1962, he seemed finished. However he would stage the ultimate come back a take the presidency in 1968. Yet he would lose it all by 1974 in the Watergate scandal that brought him low.
"Schlesinger called this new, more muscular executive `the Imperial Presidency,' and while he had seen its beginnings in the administrations of other leaders, it was Richard Nixon who seemed to him to have taken the arrogance of power to a new level. After all, it was one thing for a president to claim executive privilege in the conduct of war, but Nixon had extended the definition of national security to encompass much o this domestic decision-making, indeed as a justification for any and every executive act. `When the president does it,' he said, famously, `that means it is not illegal.'" (p.439)
Whatever ones personal opinion of Ronald Reagan, no one can deny he changed the political landscape of America. The dynamics of American politics completely changed with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 more than any since Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932.
"Ronald Wilson Reagan was the most significant president in forty years. When, in 1980, he was elected to the nation's highest office, catapulted by anger over Carter-era interest rates and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, some had feared the former California governor for his simplistic and extremist rhetoric, particularly on issues of foreign policy. Still, most people assumed the old maxim would apply--the one that said that the office had a tendency to smooth the edges, turn all men into moderates--and that Reagan's would ultimately be a presidency like that of his two recent Republican predecessors: conservative, yes, but unchallenging either to the long-established principles of containment as regards foreign policy or to the consensus on social policy that had been in place since the time of Roosevelt and the and the New Deal. They could not have been more wrong." (p.475)
The HIV virus was discovered the same year that I was born, I have been reminded of that every significant birthday I have ever had. The gay rights movement less than a decade from Stone Wall was finally gaining some strength, then a new virus that nailed them first and practically decimated a generation. And since it was that group that fell first, the government hesitated to even get involved, the far right even praising the disease as god's cure. Had the government taken action sooner who knows how many lives could have been saved?
"By 1986, fear had even penetrated the nation's bedrooms. For years, medical science had been scoring success after success, so many that there was the feeling that disease was about to become an anachronism. Along with technology, medicine had been society's best advertisement for progress, boasting an uninterrupted flow of accomplishments leading to the bettering of human life. Then came the deadly pandemic known as AIDS. The acronym (for `acquired immune deficiency syndrome') started out from the page ominously, like a finger of fate resurrected from the time when plagues like the Black Death ravaged whole populations in medical Europe. Now AIDS appeared capable of wiping out as much of a quarter of those alive in out own time, an Old Testament kind of scourge spread primarily through sexual contact, which in itself represented a cruel piece of irony, for now man's most intimate act, the one that conceives life and gives pleasure, could also take life away." (p.494)
Now you cannot talk about the twentieth century without mentioning computers, after all I am word processing this on a computer and placing it on a blog. We now live in a world for computers that humans just live in.
"To many people, the computer was a positively magical device--not a machine in the usual sense, but something else. It was not, after all, like a mechanical wristwatch or a car or any of the traditional kinds of machines with which one was familiar, the kinds that could be opened up and examined, with their levers and gears moving. Open up a computer and it looked nothing like what it did, for information was stored there and retrieved from there in ways invisible to the human eye. And the computer didn't even do `work' in the traditional sense, either. Most machines are like slaves. The automobile, for instance, starts and is propelled forward by its driver's commands, but a computer is more like a partner, a collaborator--performing functions at the behest of its user, yes, but also taking in information, interpreting it, then delivering back recommendations that inform the user's next set of commands." (p.551)
In close, The Century is a remarkable read about a remarkable time. The twentieth century began with President William McKinley and ended with President William J. Clinton, it starts with funeral for Queen Victory and ends with one for the Princess of Wales (who just posthumously became a grandmother). In 1900s the old world was smashed and replaced by bi-polarization that terrified the world with the thought of nuclear destruction. Yet, that new order did not see the end of the century as the Cold War ends with the Berlin Wall coming down and Soviet Union falling. Then Americans could spend the final decade wondering who their President was having sex with, completely oblivious to the horror that was coming in the next decade.
In his classical story Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving tried to demonstrate how life in America rapidly changes. If a man went to sleep for thirty years he would wake up to find the world unrecognizable. In the twentieth century you don't have to do a story where a man skips thirty years, if you missed five straight weeks you would be struggling to catch up. As each year passed, society rolled out a new piece of technology often changing life as we know it.
"The change was sudden and dramatic, and how could it not be? The automobile was, after all, the first significant improvement in self-guided transportation since the bicycle (which, after its introduction in 1839, had a similarly dramatic effect upon the nineteenth century). And by the time it became widely available to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the car had already begun to redefine nearly every facet of life.
The burgeoning automobile age established a new since of freedom and individuality: people no longer had to make their plans according to train schedules, and they traveled not with hundreds of strangers, but by themselves or with family and friends. At the same time, it also established a new, wider sense of community: small towns and villages that existed miles away from anyplace else were now connected to each other by roads, granting people who had long lived in isolation the opportunity to enjoy up-to-date medical care, higher-quality education, and whatever else lay `down the road.'" (p.103)
One of the biggest mistakes of the twentieth century was the establishment of prohibition. It was supported across the political spectrum by people who were foolish enough to believe that you can change bad personal behavior by simply making said behavior illegal. Prohibition only succeeded in making drinking less public, led to a major crime wave, and wasted lots of money. Unfortunately prohibition goes on today, just not with alcohol, but in this new madness called the drug war waged by over-budgeted vice squads.
"One cause that united both minister and Klansmen was the Eighteenth Amendment. The movement to ban the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages had once been led by Progressives, who cited growing studies showing the medical risks of heavy drinking and alcohol's destructive influence on marriage and family. But by the time Prohibition was enacted, its driving force was puritan, who hoped it would beat back the forces loosing modern morals, and the nativist, who saw it as a way of rejecting the wine-drinking immigrants of southern Europe. Of course, it did neither." (p. 119)
This book also allowed me to once again appreciate the accomplishment of Charles Lindbergh, despite that the guy personally was giant rat dressed as a man; he was one hell of an aviator.
"By the mid-1920s, the airplane seemed to have more potential as a circus act than it did as a vehicle for transportation. Carnivals and county fairs featured daredevil riders performing stunts like wing-walking and parachute jumping, and spectators bought rides at five dollars a thrill. Barnstorming pilots, evangelists for aviation's future, hopped from airfield to airfield, moving without maps, going as far as their gas supplies would take them, gathering circus crowds whenever they were alit. But while people everywhere found the flying machines interesting, the general mood was one of `you'll never get me up in one of those things.' Then came Lindy." (p.136)
Nothing would alter the world more than the most awful events of the twentieth century: World War II and the Holocaust. Both the events and their aftermath would transform the direction of the human race, and the one who brought both these things about was tyrant Adolph Hitler. Because this man lived millions would die as he succeeded in brainwashing a nation.
"Early in his career, Hitler had discovered that he had an extraordinary talent for the kind of oratory that would appeal directly to such feelings, and once the moment of public vulnerability arrived he exploited it to the fullest. In speeches that often ran two hours or longer, he would hold a crowd of up to half a million spellbound, taking time first to warm up and sense the mood of his audience, then diving in to do his work. Sweating profusely, shaking with fury, he would build the attitude of his listeners into a frenzy, playing with an assortment of techniques that would make them first laugh, then cry, then explode in a fit of rage." (p.168)
While there was a worldwide depression going on and mad men rising to power life still went on, and before Facebook, World Wide Web and cable television (or any television) there was Life magazine capturing the world in some of its greatest and not so great moments.
"Among the places the New Deal pictures appeared was a fresh new photo magazine called Life. Started in 1936 by Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life was an instant success. The mere idea of a photo magazine was so exciting to thirties' readers, it inspired more than a quarter million of them to buy subscriptions even before the first issue had been published. And once Life hit the newsstands, its popularity rose so quickly, Luce nearly killed it when he couldn't raise advertising rates fast enough to pay for the magazine's skyrocketing circulation." (p.192)
One of my favorite aspects of this book is the articles that were written by various people who were at major historic events or were just aware they were living in unique times. The one written by Karla Stept about the German takeover in Austria is especially powerful.
"All of this was a complete shock to us, because we had never heard of things like this happening in Germany. And we found out later on, they never did happen there. It was an Austrian specialty. What took five years to accomplish in Germany took them only twenty-four hours in Austria. One should not forget that. For five years in Germany they had worked up to this by adding one thing to the next. In, Austria they did it in just one day. The Germans had to learn to be anti-Semitic. The Austrians always were. They must have harbored all that rage for hundreds of years. And now suddenly they were free to express it." (p.200)
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a world that was ruled by Europe but by the century's midpoint that was coming to fast end. The great European empires were stretched out financially, physically, and morally. In the modern world it was not going to be acceptable for people to be governed by governments thousands of miles away, who were given little to know say on how it was conducted.
"One of the most far-reaching consequences of the Second World War was the abrupt end that it brought to colonization. The finish came at the urging of the United States, which had long argued that colonial empires were inconsistent with its belief in democracy, and at the expense of the crippled European powers, particularly Britain, whose rule had dominated the map for centuries. But the change was inevitable: if they had done nothing else, the century's wars had confirmed the legitimacy of the dusty old order and its subjugation of the masses (though the surge in the world's population would probably have forced the issue if war had not). Even the Moscow-led Communist insurgencies, seizing power sometimes with little popular support, cynically claimed the mantel of democracy." (p.308)
The automobile changed the way people traveled the television changed the way people stayed home. You could listen to radio and work, television involved your most important sense: sight. People now had a window to the world in their living room.
"There were something irresistible about television, and while few understood just how important it would become (more a new environment than a new mass medium, as inescapable as the weather, wrote Richard Reeves), they wanted to there when it took off. In the medium's early years there was Howdy Doody and the World Series, but only when the rectangular cathode-ray tube was perfected in 1950 and the price of the average DuMont and Philco dropped to $200 in 1953 did the age of television truly descend upon the nation. By 1960 more than 45 million television sets found homes, not only in the suburbs, where their elaborate wood cabinets fit quite nicely into the family room or the den, but also in the inner-city taverns (where bartenders complained that patrons spent too much time watching and not enough time drinking.)" (p. 331)
With television's rise came a new kind of media celebrity. Now not only would people's work be famous but also their image. America had always had celebrities, you can say our first was Ben Franklin, but now the celebrity's image was burned into public retinas. It would give some people everlasting fame, but they would never be normal again.
"Elvis Presley was one of two mass media figures who came of age in the fifties. The other is Marilyn Monroe. That the age of television should have produced one of the biggest movie stars in history would seem to be a paradox, but just as Elvis was more than just a musician, Marilyn was more than a movie star. She was Marilyn, the object of mid-century wish fulfillment for men, of envy for women, and of fascination for quite nearly everyone with eyes." (p.346)
Just as the colonial empires were falling apart internationally, at home, a new revolutionary movement was starting that would tear down the system of Jim Crow and challenge the very public consciousness to the injustice that nation had let go on for centuries. The legacy of the movement still battles on today.
"To be alive in the sixties was to feel exhilarated, present, not necessarily happy but at least fiercely awake. To be young in the sixties was to be all this and more. Along with the `consciousness-raising' and pleasure (particularly sexual pleasure, freed from the fear of pregnancy when the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill in 1960), the sixties glorified youth and freedom; the years also maligned old age and tradition, discipline, and conformity that had been the hallmark of the most recent decade." (p.370)
John F. Kennedy, the second youngest president and the youngest elected, took office on January 20, 1961 and arrived like a breath of fresh air. Kennedy had an energetic presidency that created the P.E.A.C.E. Corps and challenged the nation to go to the moon. He had his setbacks such as the Bay of Pigs disaster and the late response to the Civil Rights Movement, however his greatest hour occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he got the Russians to take the missiles out of Cuba. The nation was traumatized when the President was taken from them, on television.
"Anyone alive and aware on November 22, 1963, when the news from Dallas arrived across the radios, television, and phone lines, in the form of frantic voices of neighbors calling over suburban lawns and the somber tones of tearful school principals speaking to their students from loudspeakers, remembers in sharp detail where they were and what they were doing. More interesting is those who can recall what they felt. For most, the information stuck like a poisoned tipped dagger, delivering to they system equal amounts of grief and disbelief." (p.384)
Kennedy didn't live to see his moon landing, but it happened before the end of that decade. For years some cultures had worshiped the moon, and everyone has looked at it. It was Neil Armstrong however, who walked on it and stuck our flag in it.
"Still, like Lindbergh's feat in the twenties, the astronauts' mission had provided a balm for the pain of their own crazy decade, perhaps most importantly in the views their lunar camera captured when they were directed back towards earth. At home, mo matter where you stood, the sixties looked messy and unreadable, like a painting viewed too close to make out anything but the texture of the brush strokes and the smudge of color. Yet from out there, in the dark eternity of the universe, the planet projected a picture of harmony, an essential beautiful orb, ordered and still." (p.419)
America saw one president murdered on TV, and then they saw a second one fall. Richard M. Nixon had been a major figure in politics since the late forties, served in the House, Senate, and as Vice President to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After losing the presidency to Kennedy in 1960, then the California governorship to Pat Brown in 1962, he seemed finished. However he would stage the ultimate come back a take the presidency in 1968. Yet he would lose it all by 1974 in the Watergate scandal that brought him low.
"Schlesinger called this new, more muscular executive `the Imperial Presidency,' and while he had seen its beginnings in the administrations of other leaders, it was Richard Nixon who seemed to him to have taken the arrogance of power to a new level. After all, it was one thing for a president to claim executive privilege in the conduct of war, but Nixon had extended the definition of national security to encompass much o this domestic decision-making, indeed as a justification for any and every executive act. `When the president does it,' he said, famously, `that means it is not illegal.'" (p.439)
Whatever ones personal opinion of Ronald Reagan, no one can deny he changed the political landscape of America. The dynamics of American politics completely changed with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 more than any since Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932.
"Ronald Wilson Reagan was the most significant president in forty years. When, in 1980, he was elected to the nation's highest office, catapulted by anger over Carter-era interest rates and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, some had feared the former California governor for his simplistic and extremist rhetoric, particularly on issues of foreign policy. Still, most people assumed the old maxim would apply--the one that said that the office had a tendency to smooth the edges, turn all men into moderates--and that Reagan's would ultimately be a presidency like that of his two recent Republican predecessors: conservative, yes, but unchallenging either to the long-established principles of containment as regards foreign policy or to the consensus on social policy that had been in place since the time of Roosevelt and the and the New Deal. They could not have been more wrong." (p.475)
The HIV virus was discovered the same year that I was born, I have been reminded of that every significant birthday I have ever had. The gay rights movement less than a decade from Stone Wall was finally gaining some strength, then a new virus that nailed them first and practically decimated a generation. And since it was that group that fell first, the government hesitated to even get involved, the far right even praising the disease as god's cure. Had the government taken action sooner who knows how many lives could have been saved?
"By 1986, fear had even penetrated the nation's bedrooms. For years, medical science had been scoring success after success, so many that there was the feeling that disease was about to become an anachronism. Along with technology, medicine had been society's best advertisement for progress, boasting an uninterrupted flow of accomplishments leading to the bettering of human life. Then came the deadly pandemic known as AIDS. The acronym (for `acquired immune deficiency syndrome') started out from the page ominously, like a finger of fate resurrected from the time when plagues like the Black Death ravaged whole populations in medical Europe. Now AIDS appeared capable of wiping out as much of a quarter of those alive in out own time, an Old Testament kind of scourge spread primarily through sexual contact, which in itself represented a cruel piece of irony, for now man's most intimate act, the one that conceives life and gives pleasure, could also take life away." (p.494)
Now you cannot talk about the twentieth century without mentioning computers, after all I am word processing this on a computer and placing it on a blog. We now live in a world for computers that humans just live in.
"To many people, the computer was a positively magical device--not a machine in the usual sense, but something else. It was not, after all, like a mechanical wristwatch or a car or any of the traditional kinds of machines with which one was familiar, the kinds that could be opened up and examined, with their levers and gears moving. Open up a computer and it looked nothing like what it did, for information was stored there and retrieved from there in ways invisible to the human eye. And the computer didn't even do `work' in the traditional sense, either. Most machines are like slaves. The automobile, for instance, starts and is propelled forward by its driver's commands, but a computer is more like a partner, a collaborator--performing functions at the behest of its user, yes, but also taking in information, interpreting it, then delivering back recommendations that inform the user's next set of commands." (p.551)
In close, The Century is a remarkable read about a remarkable time. The twentieth century began with President William McKinley and ended with President William J. Clinton, it starts with funeral for Queen Victory and ends with one for the Princess of Wales (who just posthumously became a grandmother). In 1900s the old world was smashed and replaced by bi-polarization that terrified the world with the thought of nuclear destruction. Yet, that new order did not see the end of the century as the Cold War ends with the Berlin Wall coming down and Soviet Union falling. Then Americans could spend the final decade wondering who their President was having sex with, completely oblivious to the horror that was coming in the next decade.
March 29, 2008
this was such a great book. i begged and begged to get it, and got it for christmas one year. even though it's no longer 1999, it's still a great book.
August 14, 2011
I suspect the book is denser than the audiobook. The audiobook is interesting, but rather insubstantial. For someone who is embarrassingly bad with history, I'm learning surprisingly little.
October 11, 2016
As a child who loved reading encyclopedias, I loved the concise descriptions of the main events coupled with personal stories I hadn't read before.
October 13, 2017
Great book to take your time with - read a segment - discuss with a loved one or friend. Enlightening.
December 5, 2020
A bit dated but I enjoyed the personal stories throughout.
March 10, 2024
3.76 / 5.0
Lots of good pictures that relate to content nicely . Margin quotes are illuminating and personal anecdotes are a nice touch. Editorial voice tries to be neutral, but is noticeably prejudiced and oversteps frequently.
Lots of good pictures that relate to content nicely . Margin quotes are illuminating and personal anecdotes are a nice touch. Editorial voice tries to be neutral, but is noticeably prejudiced and oversteps frequently.
January 19, 2018
An interesting exploration of the major events of the 20th century, with deeper storytelling than most historical reviews.
February 22, 2023
A pretty comprehensive coverage of the 20th century. Great photos!
February 28, 2025
So cool to read this as a young kid growing up in the early 2000s
October 3, 2017
It was pretty good, but a bit tedious at points. About the complete 1901-1999 years. 4.5/5
December 14, 2009
The Century
Grades 1st-? (I enjoyed it as an adult)
Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster put together an amazing amount of research into an educational yet enjoyable book that people of all ages will enjoy and learn from. The text is surrounded by fascinating pictures of historical events that pull the reader into the article. A photo that caught my eye was of a man sitting on a step mourning the death of President Kennedy. These types of photographs show the human emotion in much more detail than any words could explain. Students will be able to learn about particular parts of American history without having to read an entire book.
Social Studies/Language Arts
Language Arts- Have the students pick a topic out of this book to write a report on. They can use other reference materials as well.
Grades 1st-? (I enjoyed it as an adult)
Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster put together an amazing amount of research into an educational yet enjoyable book that people of all ages will enjoy and learn from. The text is surrounded by fascinating pictures of historical events that pull the reader into the article. A photo that caught my eye was of a man sitting on a step mourning the death of President Kennedy. These types of photographs show the human emotion in much more detail than any words could explain. Students will be able to learn about particular parts of American history without having to read an entire book.
Social Studies/Language Arts
Language Arts- Have the students pick a topic out of this book to write a report on. They can use other reference materials as well.
February 13, 2011
A fascinating account of the last century, encompassing the optimistic start of the 20th Century to the more wary end of the Millennium. I've been nostalgic all week from watching "Electric Dreams" (on the History Channel) and reading this book. It's strange thing being able to look at the past century and realize how much things have changed just a hundred years ago. I don't thing any other century has encountered as many changes as the last (heck, we change "fashion" every season and gadgets every year. The Ipod is pretty old-school now that we have the Ipad), and we haven't really changed. We still struggle with the same issues, perhaps now made even more real by the shrinking world. History is a cycle. And after reviewing the past century, the heights of excess and the lows of wars, the future doesn't look that bright.
July 10, 2015
I picked this book up at the thrift store for $5. I think this might be the single best thrift store deal ever!
Anyway... I really enjoyed this book. My only wish is that there were more "personal accounts" throughout; I like reading about historical events, but I really enjoy the 1st hand account that only a person who lived the event can give.
That being said, I think that Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster did a good job cramming this book full of just about everything that happened since 1900. I would say that this was a pretty admirable accomplishment.
Anyway... I really enjoyed this book. My only wish is that there were more "personal accounts" throughout; I like reading about historical events, but I really enjoy the 1st hand account that only a person who lived the event can give.
That being said, I think that Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster did a good job cramming this book full of just about everything that happened since 1900. I would say that this was a pretty admirable accomplishment.
September 23, 2010
Maybe four stars, actually, just because I found reading through all the first-person bits, looking at the sweep of the century, etc., very absorbing and even fascinating. Photos were also very interesting, all the sidebars, etc. too. I wasn't crazy about the overall narration by Jennings and Brewster, though. For all they state in the introduction that they are trying to present the century as people saw it as they went through it at the time, they come off pretty high-handed at times in the narrative. Very interesting, though.
January 4, 2009
It's one of those books that I'm sure is currently sitting on many a coffee table, but I actually really enjoyed reading it. While Peter Jennings is clearly not the best source on the 20th century, he offers an interesting perspective, but to me the most memorable and valuable part of this book is the eye-witness accounts of major events in our history, and remembrances of day-to-day life during different eras.
November 22, 2011
I'm so glad this came up on my reading roulette wheel! Even though it took me a couple of months (it needs to be read in small bites), it was well worth the time. It gave a nice overview of the historical events in the past century and clarrified several in my mind. Unfortunately, it included a reading list at the back that will just add more books to my To Read list!
March 4, 2011
I bought this a Christmas gift for my mom back in 1999. We had both been watching the accompanying series from ABC News. I've since "inherited" it.
This is one of those "coffee-table-books".
It's a fascinating look at the 20th century.
I've not looked @ it in years, and my millennium excitement waned sometime in 2000, but it's nice otherwise nice to have...
This is one of those "coffee-table-books".
It's a fascinating look at the 20th century.
I've not looked @ it in years, and my millennium excitement waned sometime in 2000, but it's nice otherwise nice to have...
August 16, 2014
This beautiful coffee table book or you can put it on your bookshelf is definitely a gem to have. This book features pictures and description of some of the most pivotal moments in history. If you are a history buff, I recommend you have this book around to have a pictorial history on how our world changed with the times.
February 2, 2008
i am a history fanatic and this one is so great because of all the fabulous pictures, and excellent stories. i have heard negative things on the way peter jennings had presented the news, but i think he did a fine job on this book.
March 27, 2008
A wonderful, comprehensive look at the 20th Century and it's history. I hope that, someday, someone will put an addendum to the end of the book, for the final few years of the 1990s that they missed because the book was published before the end of the century.
April 16, 2008
I enjoyed reading this book. It took a while to get through, because it is a history book. I enjoyed the way the history was told. I also enjoyed increasing my knowledge on the different things that happened during the 20th century.
November 17, 2007
What an amazing book. Peter Jennings does an awesome job.
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July 17, 2008909.821osb
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December 27, 2008909.82 Bre
May 16, 2009
This is a "coffee table" book. I think Peter Jennings was a great boor and greatly over-rated as a news personality.
September 5, 2012
A coffee table book, but I pick it up often and read chapter after chapter about the amazing 20th Century!
December 31, 2012
Excellent...great as a go-to for refreshers on recent history, and engaging enough to read from cover to cover which is what I did:) It will stay where I can grab it for reference.
September 7, 2012
A timeless reference book. I read it cover to cover when I bought it. It's really a good reference book especially for children who have no knoweledge of the past Century and need a quick guide.
March 4, 2013
Very good foundation for understanding the 20th Century
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