The History of the Twentieth Century

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it freed the Nazis from having to worry about international opinion. Hitler and his followers could now do as they pleased.

With the other Great Powers involved in their own wars, Stalin and the USSR are now free to claim the territories Germany granted to their "sphere of influence."

Adolf Hitler wanted to attack in the west immediately after the fall of Poland, but unfavorable weather kept postponing the offensive. Then a copy of the plan fell into Allied hands.

In the final year before the war began, Winston Churchill's denunciations of Nazi Germany began to seem prescient, but Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fiercely resisted calls to invite Churchill into the Cabinet until war came. Then Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, for the second time in his career.

Improbably, the nation of Norway finds itself the front line of the Second World War.

The Allied debacle in Norway sparked a revolt in the British Parliament against the Chamberlain government's conduct of the war.

After months of delays and a diversion into Denmark and Norway, Hitler finally gets his Western offensive.

After German armor cut off the Allied First Army Group in Belgium, the Royal Navy attempts an evacuation of the trapped forces from the port of Dunkirk.

After the Dunkirk evacuation, the next stage of the Western offensive began, aimed at capturing Paris and defeating France.

The world reacts to the Fall of France.

We examine the advances in aviation technology between the World Wars.

Theories of strategic bombing in the 1930s suggested that it alone might be enough to win a war. But the development of radar meant that the bomber might not always get through after all.

When the Churchill government showed no willingness to talk peace, Germany attempted the world's first purely aerial military campaign, to weaken Britain in preparation for invasion, or perhaps even to defeat the enemy entirely by air.

The 1939-40 New York World's Fair.

Pulp fiction was an important form of entertainment in the twentieth century, peaking in popularity around 1940. Pulp fiction came in a variety of genres and was the birthplace for a new one: science fiction.

More on various genres of pulp fiction, and how they led to the development of comic books.

America was preoccupied with domestic issues during the run-up to the war. When the war came, the Roosevelt Administration looked for ways to aid the Allies despite the limitations of the Neutrality Act.

When France collapsed, Roosevelt redoubled his effort to aid Britain. But there was also a Presidential election to think about; Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term.

Germany found that it could not defeat the British on their home island; the UK was unable to fight the Germans in Europe. So what next?

Benito Mussolini wanted to prove that Italy was an equal partner with Germany in the Axis alliance, so he began a war with Greece.

Italy's invasion of Greece was disastrous. With the British also advancing in North Africa, and a surprise air attack disabling three Italian battleships, it was no longer possible to pretend that Italy was a equal of Germany.

In 1940, the British government was in the frustrating position of funding research on a number of promising projects that would be valuable to the war effort, but with the Battle of Britain in full swing, British factories had to turn out fighter planes as fast as they could. There was no room for development of experimental new technologies, so the British turned to the United States

The navy Germany had at the outbreak of the Second World War was only a small fraction of what the Allies had arrayed against it. But the Fall of France and the entry of Italy into the war changed things dramatically and created opportunities at sea that Germany had never had in the last war.

The British had been hugely successful at breaking German codes in the First World War. The Germans were determined not to let that happen again. This time they had Enigma, a code machine that produced messages that could not be decrypted. Or so the Germans believed.

After the fall of Poland, British Intelligence's codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park became the center of efforts to decrypt messages from the Germans' supposedly unbreakable Enigma machine.

In summer of 1940, even as the Battle of Britain was just getting started, Adolf Hitler was already laying plans for war with the Soviet Union.

As Germany made preparations to assist its ally Italy in the war against Greece, a coup in Yugoslavia prompted Adolf Hitler to order the invasion of that country as well. 

Germany executes its invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece, and the Axis encourages an anti-British coup in Iraq.

The Dust Bowl ravages the central United States, Charles Lindbergh's infant son is kidnapped, the America First movement opposes US involvement in the war.

On June 22, 1941, Germany began an invasion of its erstwhile trade partner, the USSR. 

The German invasion of the USSR went brilliantly for the first 2-3 weeks, but instead of collapsing as expected, the Red Army only got stronger.

Even before the first German soldier crossed the frontier into the USSR, the Nazi government in Berlin had a plan for administering occupied Russia.

At the end of the rasputitsa, the mud season, the German Army had one final, narrow opportunity, to win the war against the USSR before winter.

The upper levels of Japanese government (and, more important, the military) increasingly came to the view that war with the United States was necessary if Japan was to survive.

The defining features of the nation of Panama are its abundant wildlife and that it is the place where the world's two largest oceans are at their closest.

The Japanese give up on peace talks with America and began prepare for war.

The Japanese attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor ended the political division in the US between interventionists and isolationists. Now the US was united as never before.

The Japanese Army's greatest victory; the British Army's greatest defeat.

The Luftwaffe's bombing campaign over England did not force a British capitulation. Can RAF Bomber Command force a German capitulation?

After the sinking of Bismarck, the Germans abandoned surface raiding in the Atlantic and turned to their greatest naval strength: submarine warfare.

The winter of 1941-42 was not a happy one for the German Army. On the Eastern Front it was battered by a record cold winter and a Soviet counteroffensive. In North Africa, a British offensive pushed Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps all the way back to central Libya, from where he had begun.

Sometime in the autumn of 1941, a decision was made among the Nazi elite to murder every Jewish person in Europe--or within reach, anyway. No record exists of how that decision was made, but we have a very detailed record of how it was carried out.

In 1942, many Americans feared a Japanese invasion of the West Coast of the US or Canada was imminent. Regrettably, these fears led to the belief--unsupported by facts--that the ethnic Japanese population on the West Coast represented a dangerous fifth column of potential spies and saboteurs.

For India, like Australia, the entry of Japan into the war meant it was no longer a distant, European struggle. By May 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army was at the Indian border.

Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt asked the military to find a way to strike back at the Japanese Home Islands. It took an unorthodox approach to make this possible.

The US Navy sent two of its carriers into the southwest Pacific to thwart the Japanese campaign to take New Caledonia and isolate Australia. The Japanese responded by sending two of their own. The carriers engaged each other in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The Japanese execute their attempted ambush at Midway, and it fails catastrophically.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most vicious of the Nazis. So much so that the Czechoslovak and British governments decided that he needed to be eliminated.

When the United States entered the war, the German U-boats suddenly had many more targets.

Rommel was surprised by a British offensive (Operation Crusader) and his forces were driven all the way back to where he had started from a year earlier. But in a few months, he and his army pushed the British back to where they had started.

Adolf Hitler redeployed Luftwaffe units from the Eastern front to the Mediterranean. With Axis air superiority in the region established, shipments of equipment and supplies to Panzer Army Africa substantially increased. Soon Rommel was on the move again, this time driving the British deep into Egypt.

The war against Japan brought the Nationalists and the Communists back into a new alliance, but it didn't last. Mao Zedong polished up his political writings and asserted his authority over the Party.

The US military went into the war just itching to invade France and take on the Germans ASAP. It was up to the British to talk them down, though the Allies did attempt a raid on the French coast at the port of Dieppe. Meanwhile, German intelligence infiltrated saboteurs into the United States.

The German 1942 offensive in the USSR began well, so well that Hitler split the offensive into two parts. The German Army was advancing on Stalingrad and threatening to cut Russia off from its oil fields in the Caucasus.

In the first American offensive action of the war, US marines land on Guadalcanal.

It started with the concentration camps.

The Nazis applied the experience they had gained from murdering disabled people and Soviet POWs to their project to exterminate Jewish people in Europe.

German forces advance on Stalingrad in August 1942, while Adolf Hitler becomes increasingly hostile and mistrustful of his military commanders.

When German soldiers began their assault on the city of Stalingrad, they expected a quick victory, but the Soviet defense was far tougher than they had imagined.

As Bernard Montgomery plotted an offensive against Axis forces in North Africa from the east, Dwight Eisenhower was plotting one from the west.

The Battle of Stalingrad was a throwback to the kinds of battles fought in the last war. Like Verdun, the Germans were paying a heavy price. Would the gain be worth it?

In October 1942, Bernard Montgomery began his long-awaited offensive against the Italians and Germans in Egypt. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean, the Allies were preparing to open a new front in Africa.

The Anglo-American amphibious landings in French North Africa were not only a complex military operation. There was also complex negotiation going on behind the scenes. The Allies did not want to defeat French forces in North Africa; they wanted the French to join them.

The battle for Stalingrad raged on for two months, then the situation was suddenly upended by a surprise Soviet offensive that surrounded the city.

The Germans began an operation to relieve the siege of Stalingrad, but the Red Army was already prepared with a counter attack.

In October and November 1942, the Japanese began their final push to drive the Americans off Guadalcanal.

Roosevelt and Churchill met again in early 1943 to discuss the next stage of the war against the Axis, and they chose a provocative venue: Casablanca, a city their armies had only recently taken.

Stalingrad falls and Joseph Goebbels tries to spark a program to ramp up the German war effort.

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

The fall of Burma to the Japanese put India on the front lines of the war, posing hard questions for the Indian nationalist movement.

The first in a series looking at the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the "studio system."

RKO Radio Pictures had a reputation for producing second-rate films. Even so, this was the studio that signed Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn; it was the studio that released King Kong and Citizen Kane.

Hitler himself said that he had "never been a man of the defensive," but in the aftermath of Stalingrad, he had no choice.

The Allies invade Sicily, which leads to the fall of Benito Mussolini.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American atom bomb project kicked into high gear. Fearful that the Germans were already working on a bomb and had a head start, the US government built a huge program meant to approach the problem of building an atom bomb from several different angles all at once.

In early 1943, the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the SS. Farther east, the German Army uncovers the mass grave where the Soviet NKVD buried thousands of murdered Polish Army officers.

The Japanese claimed to be liberating their fellow Asians from Western oppression, but Japanese rule proved to be brutal and murderous.

Warner Brothers was one of the minor studios until they introduced the first talking picture, which made the studio into one of the majors. In the Thirties, Warner Brothers, led by the irascible Jack L. Warner, was known for its glitzy musicals and crime dramas. In the early Forties, the studio released two films that are now regarded as among the best American films ever made: The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

Adolf Hitler begins his long-delayed 1943 offensive against the USSR, which fizzles in a matter of days.

The German offenive failed. Then it was the Soviets' turn.

The Japanese come to the reluctant conclusion that they have to abandon Guadalcanal and northeastern New Guinea. US submarine warfare begins to take a toll, and Admiral Yamamoto is killed.

As the war turned against them, the Japanese attempted to create allies among the nations it occupied, declaring the independence of Burma and the Philippines, while the US embraced China as a peer of the main Allied powers, alongside the US, UK, and USSR.

After two years of trying, RAF Bomber Command at last perfected the techniques to inflict mass casualties and devastation on an enemy city. Meanwhile, the US Eighth Air Force struggled to develop their own strategies.

The Hamburg bombing forced the German government to rethink its defense policies. In Québec, Churchill and Roosevelt cut a deal on atom bomb research.

The U-boat war was going quite well for the Germans at the beginning of 1943, but by mid-year, the German Navy was on the verge of abandoning the effort.

In the occupied countries of Europe and Asia, resistance movements developed to oppose Axis occupations. In most cases, the resistance movements were divided between Communist and non-Communist.

Some of the biggest successes (and biggest failures) of European resistance movements and their guides in Britain.

Resistance against the Nazis could take many forms.

In this episode, we look at Twentieth Century-Fox, John Ford, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, and Alfred Hitchcock.

As war raged around the globe, the city of Leningrad suffered under a German siege that lasted 872 days.

Hundreds of thousands died in Leningrad during the winter of 1941-42, but with spring came new hope. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich's latest symphony became a patriotic anthem, and not only in the USSR.

The end of the Battle of Kursk did not mean the end of the Red Army advance. The Germans withdrew, but the Red Army just kept coming.

The history of Paramount Pictures, one of the oldest and most prominent film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.

An eventful period in July-August 1943, when there were major developments on the Eastern Front, in the Mediterranean, and in the Pacific.

Continuing from the previous episode, we examine events in multiple theaters in August-September 1943

The Japanese "Zero" fighter plane played an important role in Japan's amazing victories early in the Pacific war. But by 1943, the Zero (and its pilots) were falling behind their Allied counterparts.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, created in 1924 by the merger of three film production companies, quickly rose to become the most successful studio of the era. The record box office for the 1939 film Gone with the Wind represents the studio at its height.

The Big Three--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--met and conferred together for the first time in November 1943. It was the most important meeting of world leaders since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

The German Army continued to retreat westward over the winter of 1943-44, abandoning most of Ukraine. Red Army pressure was relentless, not giving the Germans any opportunity to establish a strong defensive line.

The Allies hoped their invasion of the Italian mainland would lead to a rapid occupation of Italy, but the Germans put up a defense that slowed their advance to a crawl.

A look at some prominent blues singers, plus Judy Garland and her most famous role, as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz.

The US tries out a new strategy against Japan, but the American public is shocked by the cost. 

When Hitler learned that the Hungarian government was attempting to make a separate peace with the Allies, he ordered the German military to occupy Hungary, which was also the home of the largest surviving Jewish community in Axis-occupied Europe.

The Holocaust should not be viewed as strictly a Nazi project or even a German project. Millions of people across Europe share responsibility for those crimes.

The war era (1939-45) saw the beginning of the end of the big band era. Part of this decline was due to two key strikes in the music industry.

The Allied campaign in Italy stalled, and British and American leaders were searching for a way to break the stalemate on the peninsula. Winston Churchill suggested an amphibious invasion behing enemy lines.

As soon as Allied leaders chose Normandy as the site of the Operation Overlord invasion, British intelligence set to work convincing the Germans that the invasion would be somewhere else.

The Americans were on the offensive in the Southwest Pacific, and after Tarawa, in the Central Pacific. As they advanced, Japanese military leaders scrambled to find a way to stop the Americans.

Boogie-woogie went mainstream in America during the war, as evidenced by the music of Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters.

During the interwar period, African Americans pushed back against the US military's explicit racism.

As America geared up for war, and then entered the war, African Americans fought to claim a role in the battle against fascism.

In this episode, we look at some of the preparations both sides' militaries were making for the coming invasion of France, as well as the tricky problem the Allies faced in keeping Charles de Gaulle on board.

In May 1944, Allied forces in Italy began an offensive that finally broke the Gustav Line. Soon Americans were marching into Rome. At the same time, Allied forces in Britain were making final preparations for the invasion of France.

In this Christmas bonus episode, I answer listener questions.

The German military was occupying many European countries, which put British and American bomber commanders in the awkward position of bombing nations that were supposedly their allies.

The Normandy landings began at dawn on June 6, 1944, but the night before three Allied airborne divisions were dropped into Normandy to help prepare the way for the amphibious landings.

In this episode we look at the Normandy amphibious landings generally, then focus on the US assault on Utah Beach.

We conclude our look at the Normandy invasion by examining events at Sword, Juno, Gold, and especially Omaha Beaches.

The initial Normandy invasions were moderately successful. Casualties were lighter than feared. But D-Day was not the end; it was only the beginning.

When the Americans attacked Saipan, the Japanese saw a final opportunity to force that decisive battle they'd been yearning for. 

In this episode, we conclude the story of the American occupation of Saipan, while US commanders ponder the question of where to strike next.

The China and Burma fronts remained relatively quiet for two years. That changed in 1944.

In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt's health began to fail, while Stalin made good on his pledge to begin a Soviet offensive in June.

The Soviet summer offensive of 1944, "Operation Bagration," costs the German Army virtually an entire army group.

There had been grumbling about Hitler in the Army since 1938, but by 1944 a group of officers were determined to get rid of him and overthrow the Nazi government.

Influenza has plagued the human race for some 12,000 years. It is caused by a virus, an infectious agent barely understood in 1918.

The influenza virus that emerged in 1918 was more deadly than was typical for the disease. Because of the Great War, the virus was carried to every corner of the world, including into populations of human beings who had never known the disease before. The death toll was staggering. This epidemic was the deadliest in human history, in terms of absolute number of persons killed.

The United States had a mid-term election just before the Armistice. The UK had a general election just after. Both elections would help shape the post-war world. Also, we say goodbye to Theodore Roosevelt.

With the War now behind us, we take a moment to reflect on its most important lessons.

Before the Allies were ready to negotiate with the Central Powers, they had to have a "pre-meeting" among themselves to establish a common negotiating position. This "pre-meeting" lasted five months.

This first of a three-part series on the end of Austria-Hungary tells the story of the birth of Czechoslovakia.

In this episode, we look at the birth of Yugoslavia and the cession of ethnic Romanian regions of Hungary to Romania.

In this final episode on Austria-Hungary, we look at the new nations of Austria and Hungary that emerged from the old Empire. We also take a look at two young Hungarians of the time who became important figures in the US film industry.

By 1916, both sides in the Great War had declared their desire to see an independent Poland after the war. Now the time had come.

The birth of Poland was a foregone conclusion, but where its boundaries should lie was very much in dispute and led to bloodshed.

Finland was able to win its independence from Russia peacefully, but soon after came a bloody civil war.

The three Baltic states manage to become the only Imperial Russian possessions--besides Finland and Poland--to win their independence.

Bolshevik Russia and the western Allies tried to maintain cordial relations during 1918, but it didn't last. By the end of the year, Allied troops were in Russia and Allied governments were backing anti-Bolshevik forces.

The Allies supported anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia, but once the Great War ended, the Allies were in a dilemma. Abandon the White movement, or see the conflict through?

The White armies opposing the new Bolshevik government in Moscow reached their peak in the autumn of 1919, when White armies were within 200 miles of Moscow and within sight of Petrograd.

The White movement collapsed rapidly over the winter of 1919-1920, leaving the Bolsheviks in control of Russia. Even the Allies had to reconcile themselves to the new order in Russia.

The October Revolution led to the brief emergence of independent nations of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan for the first time in centuries, but their independence was not to last. Also, we look at the early days of post-Civil War Russia.

In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, Lenin introduces the New Economic Policy, the USSR is organized, and prominent Socialist Revolutionaries are prosecuted for treason. Lenin falls ill in 1923 and dies in early 1924.

Africa had been known in Europe as the "Dark Continent." It was merely an obstacle to get around on the way to Asia, then a source of slaves, and finally a territory to exploit. Europeans took it upon themselves to educate Africans, but then educated Africans began to wonder why they still didn't have the same rights.

When the time came to determine the future of Germany's colonies, Woodrow Wilson insisted on a system of mandates that would, at least in principle, require that they be governed for the benefit of their inhabitants.

In 1919, the Allies were poised to parcel out the lands of the Near East among themselves. But the inhabitants of the region had other ideas.

An American archaeologist coined the term "The Fertile Crescent" just three years ago in 1916 to describe the arc of lands from Mesopotamia to Palestine that were the most fertile Arab territories. In 1919, France and Britain divided the Fertile Crescent between themselves, much to the displeasure of the Arabs living there.

The British accepted Hussein of Mecca as King of Hejaz, but when he resisted their plan to remake the Near East, they allowed the neighboring Emir of Najd to seize control.

As Allied troops took up positions in Turkey, the Allies and the Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which imposed a harsh set of conditions. But nationalist Turks in the interior of Anatolia were not ready to give up the struggle.

As the USA, Italy, and France lose interest in the region, Britain fights to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres, relying on the Greek Army to provide the military might. Meanwhile, the political situation in Greece changes.

The standoff between the Turks and what remained of the Allies (Greece, backed up by Britain) leads to war.

After Italy's postwar territorial demands were rejected by the other Allies, Prime Minister Orlando and the Italian delegation walked out of the peace conference.

With Italian politics becoming increasingly polarized between violent extremes, the environment is perfect for the rise of Mussolini.

The Japanese, like the Italians, had territorial demands they wanted the peace conference to recognize. They also wanted the League of Nations to embrace racial equality.

The compromise under which Japan got the German concession in China was bitterly resented in China and led to a backlash against the West.

The technological end economic changes wrought by the Great War will have major impacts even on nations that remained neutral.

Political violence in Mexico tapers off after the new constitution comes into effect, although Venustiano Carranza will not give up power willingly.

Labor unrest, racial violence, and anarchist bombs were blowing up across the USA in 1919, making many people wonder if the Bolsheviks were behind it all.

At the same time as the "Red Scare," the USA was experiencing the worst racial violence in its history. Hundreds were killed. Some claimed, without evidence, that the Bolsheviks were behind it.

As hard as it was to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, Woodrow Wilson returned home to an even greater challenge: winning Senate approval of the treaty.

As Woodrow Wilson recovered from his stroke, the effort to gain Senate approval for the Treaty of Versailles floundered, and the US government was without a leader.

On January 21, 1919, the first Dáil Éireann met in Dublin and declared itself the parliament of an Irish Republic. That same day, IRA fighters in County Tipperary stole 168 pounds of gelignite, killing the two police officers who were guarding it.  

The conflict in Ireland grows more bitter, culminating in 1920's Bloody Sunday.

With the bloodshed seemingly unending, the Lloyd George government and the Irish Republic strike an agreement.

After the abdication/removal of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany was declared a republic. But what kind of republic?

The new democratic German government believed they could get a generous peace deal from the Allies. They were wrong.

Imposing an indemnity on the defeated enemy after a war was a longstanding practice. At the Paris Peace Conference, reparations were supposed to be something more just and civilized: a charge for losses to civilians during the German occupation of Belgium and France.

Germany receives the Treaty of Versailles and is given the choice of accepting the treaty as it stands, or restarting the war.

When reparations payments first came due in 1921, the German economy was in bad shape and the government resisted payment, while the German right opposed paying them at all.

By 1923, inflation was raging in Germany, and so was the right wing.

In the two years since the Armistice, virtually nothing had gone right in the United States. In 1920, voters chose the candidate who promised a return to normalcy.

India is one of the world's oldest nations. In the early 18th century, it was the world's largest economy. By the end of that century, it was entirely under the control of a foreign multinational corporation.

In 1858, the British government took direct control over India. This was supposed to cure the injustices of Company administration, but life in India grew worse, not better.

Britain's control over India was not the main reason the UK rose to become the superpower of the 19th century, but the wealth extracted from India preserved British supremacy for decades longer than otherwise would have been possible, but at a terrible cost to the Indians.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the younger generation of nationalists had become impatient with its elders' polite political agitation and sought ways to increase the pressure on the British to grant Indians more autonomy.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, astronomers had some idea of the size and shape of our galaxy, though the consensus was that the galaxy represented the entirety of the Universe. But in the decades that followed, it became clear that the Universe was much more.

Mohandas Gandhi went to South Africa to represent an Indian business in a legal dispute. He stayed for 23 years, practicing law, advocating for equal rights for Indians, and developing his theory of resistance, which he called satyagraha.

Gandhi returned to India during the Great War, but needed some time to reacquaint himself with the country after being away for so long. The British promise more self-rule, but the ruthless killing of hundreds of peaceful, unarmed civilians in Amritsar is for many Indians the last straw.

Warren Harding was very much a hands-off kind of leader. This worked well when he appointed capable cabinet secretaries, especially Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Meanwhile, America experiences the Tulsa Massacre, the worst single episode of racial violence in its history.

After years of warlord infighting, some of the major factions were exhausted, while striking workers agitated for reform. It was time for the United Front to make its move, but the untimely death of Sun Yat-sen complicated the picture.

Jazz has its roots in a number of other musical forms: band music, spirituals, blues, and ragtime.

Jazz music, by its nature, has to be heard to be understood and appreciated. In an earlier time, it might have remained a regional or ethnic niche music for some time, but thanks to the phonograph, one musician or band could teach jazz to millions.

By 1923, evidence was mounting of scandal within the Harding Administration. The President did not acknowledge this publicly, but privately he agonized about it. It may have been a factor in his death in August.

The Teapot Dome scandal became the biggest corruption scandal in US government history. For the first time, a US cabinet secretary was sent to prison for official misdeeds.

Hardly anyone knew anything about Calvin Coolidge when he became President, yet he managed to run an Administration that accomplished much and remained popular.

By the Revolutionary era, male British colonists in North America were among the heaviest drinkers the world had ever seen. 150 years later, alcoholic beverages were banned in the US and Canada.

Prohibition came as something of a surprise, and there was widespread flouting of the law. A new drinking culture emerged, and criminal gangs made more money, and became more violent, than ever.

By 1922, the Lloyd George government was challenged on many fronts, which led to a general election and a new prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law. Perhaps the biggest challenge was debt repayment to the United States.

The death of Sun Yat-sen came at an inopportune moment, just as the Nationalists were poised to regain control over China. Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the Party's new leader. He ended the United Front and attacked and killed Communists.

After the death of Lenin, the USSR was a socialist state without a clear understanding of what that meant. Stalin ended Lenin's New Economic Policy and created a centralized push for industrialization known as the Five-Year Plan.

From its invention, radio was conceived as a means for wireless two-way communication. Radio telegrams. Radio telephones. But as the technology matured, some in the field saw the potential for radio to become much more.

Radio broadcasts were begun by companies that wanted to sell radios and were offered free of charge. But as the radio craze bloomed, it became apparent that broadcasting was going to have to pay its own way somehow.

The RCA partners settled their dispute, new technologies appeared on the horizon, including television, and the radio series, an ongoing show chronicling the adventures of a fixed cast, became a new form of entertainment.

History seemed to teach that the gold standard was the key to prosperity. But the postwar world was a different place. Economist John Maynard Keynes dismissed the gold standard as a "barbarous relic."

Churchill was out of Parliament for a couple of years following the 1922 general election. When he returned, it was as a Conservative and as chancellor of the exchequer in the new Tory government of Stanley Baldwin.

The period from roughly 1924-1933 was a time when Germany threw off the shackles of Imperial authoritarianism and embraced the new and modern in art and culture.

In the early twentieth century, France had the world's largest motion picture industry, but it was soon eclipsed by that of the USA, a larger nation where movies were extremely popular. By 1920, 8 out of 10 motion pictures made in the world came from the United States.

New York City grew to be the most populous city in the world in the 1920s, as well as home to the world's tallest buildings and the world's champion smart alecks.

Music has always been a part of theatre, from opera to vaudeville. But in the 1920s, the first true stage musicals appeared.