Subscribe to Listverse10 Decades of the 20th Century
- Published October 11, 2007 - 71 Comments
We have now moved in to the 21st century, but for virtually everyone reading here, the 20th century was our century. In this post I am taking images of 4 significant events for each decade of the 20th century. A picture paints a thousand words, so here they are:
The 1900s
1901 Australia Federates
1903 Man Flies
1905 The Theory of Relativity is Proposed
1907 Picasso Gives Birth to Modern Art
The 1910s
1912 RMS Titanic Sinks
1912 Republic of China Established
1917 Bolshevik Revolution – Communist Russia is born
1914 World War I Begins
The 1920s
1920 Prohibition Begins
1922 Tomb of Tutankhamen is Found
1925 Television is Invented
1929 On With the Show – first 100% color, 100% sound movie
The 1930s
1930 The First Full Length Color/Sound Cartoon Appears
1930 Mohandas Gandhi Leads Satyagraha Movement in India
1931 Empire State Building Opens
1939 World War II Begins
The 1940s
1944 Colossus – First Fully Electronic Computer
1945 First Atomic Bomb Built
1945 First Secretary General of the Newly Formed United Nations
1946 Cold War Begins
The 1950s
1950 Korean War Begins
1953 DNA First Accurately Modeled
1954 Rock Aound The Clock takes Rock and Roll International
1957 Sputnik 1 – First artificial satellite put into geocentric orbit
The 1960s
1962 Spacewar! The First Computer Game is Invented
1962 Pope John XXIII Starts the Vatican II Council
1967 Marxist Revolutionary Che Guevara is Executed in Bolivia
1969 Man walks on the moon
The 1970s
1973 Embargoes from the OPEC nations cause an oil Crisis in nations supporting Israel
1973 American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders
1979 Dame Margaret Thatcher Becomes the First Female UK Prime Minister
1979 Khomeini Takes Power in Iran
The 1980s
John Lennon is Shot
1984 The First Commercially Successful Graphic Interface PC Arrives with the Apple Macintosh
1986 The Chernobyl Disaster Occurs
1988 The Commercial Internet Begins
The 1990s
1990 The Gulf War Begins
1991 The Soviet Union Collapses
1996 Dolly The Sheep is Cloned
December 31, 1999 The Second Millennium Since the Birth of Christ Closes (some prefer Dec 2000)
Technorati Tags: history
October 11th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
great list. Just letting you know margaret thatcher wasn’t the first UK prime minister just the first female one.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Samsung: which is, of course, correct. I have corrected it
October 11th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Wow, what a terrific list, absolutely brilliantly done. The only thing I think that’s missing is the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 80s. This event is more signifiant than the collapse of the USSR, and undoubtedly one of the most iconic images and events of the century. However, I love how in the collapse of the USSR picture there seems to be a soldier breaking into tears. He must have been overcome by some emotion I can’t imagine.
For the Bolshevik revolution photo, wouldn’t it be more sensible to include a photo of Lenin or the storming of the Winter Palace as the photograph, rather than the Tsar which symbolises monarchist Russia?
Also, ‘1979 Dame Margaret Thatcher Becomes the First UK Prime Minister’
Don’t you mean first female Prime Minister?
October 11th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
JRafter…
1918 World war begins?
We are talking about the great war 1914 – 1918!
Great list though!
October 11th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Carl: ugh! Fixed.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I think the Great Depression would have been a lot more significant than the first movie with color and sound in the 20’s.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
JT: no -I love the Tsar and it was his murder that enabled the Communists to take the country!
Jed: It was definitely significant – but what is more significant to the average person now? A depression in the 20s or the latest blockbuster film which originated from that first movie with color and sound? Obviously the list is subjective as well
October 11th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
LOL…
Sorry to be a pain… we are still talking about the Great War 1914 to 1918?
October 11th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
jfrater: I wasn’t vindicating the Bolsheviks, I just thought the Tsar’s photo wasn’t that representative.
And anyway, the Tsar was pretty damn awful you have to admit…
October 11th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
hmm did not know homosexuality was a disorder
October 11th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Sorry JRafter it’s me again…
The Empire State Building openend on May 1st 1931.
Still a great list!
October 11th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Carl: corrected – thanks.
Mix2323: prior to then, it was considered to be so.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I though the millennium started in 2001?
October 11th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
JT: I don’t think he was awful! Better than the communists that’s for sure.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Well…anything is better than those communists, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that he was doing everthing wrong, had no intention of changing, and needed to be deposed, which he did of his own accord.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
of his own accord? At gunpoint he abdicated – when that happens in a marriage it is considered invalid – I believe the same can be said for abdication. He had no reason to change – in time the situation in Russia would have improved as it did in other places in the world.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
You forgot to put in the impact of Guns N Roses. After reading the 80’s albumn list, apparently they’re more important than curing cancer.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
The Second Millennium Since the Birth of Christ Closed on December 31, 2000.
The first year ended 12/31/01. (literally 01. Like, year 1. There was no year zero, right?)
The first decade ended 12/31/10. (Year 10.)
The first century, 12/31/100.
The first millennium, 12/31/1000.
The second millennium, 12/31/2000.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
great list!
i think we should allow ‘great list’ to be the catchphrase for wanting to compliment (universal you)you on your choice of topic while not having anything profound to contribute in comments yet still be in the comment que to read far more profound comments made such as the previous one. this could well become part of listverse culture!
*grins*
er…#17 bucslim and yeah maybe #18. will we argue the dates forever? geesh.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Actually, cartoons were around long before 1930. The first filmed cartoon was “Fantasmagorie” – a French film released in 1908.
As a point of reference, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in 1928.
Great list nonetheless, like always!
October 11th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
world war began in 1914, you have it down for 1915
October 11th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
samsung next time you want to try and correct someone double check… it says first female uk prime minister… dummy
October 11th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
hey brian-thats cause jfrater changed it. Hes still human and makes mistakes, thats why we are here to help him out. all in favor of cyns proposal say I. “I” Also, just noted the “this day in history” addition to the site, very nice!
October 11th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
let’s all play nice. and thanks ben. and yes, ‘this day..’ is teh coolness.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
okay – fixed the WWI date problem – thanks JMurf. I guess that is what happens when I write lists late in the day!
Am I am not going to get in to the debate over the millennium
October 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Urban: Thanks – I failed to mention that it was the first full length full sound full color cartoon. I have updated its caption. More on that here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_the_frog if you are interested.
October 11th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
JF, nice list…Lennon was a suprise (that he was included, not that he was murdered). No literary acheivements here? “Cathcer in the Rye”, “Sound and the Fury”, “Midnight’s Children”? Hell, even the first “Peanuts” comic strip would be fine. Do we not have great novels? Then again, it’s your list. Caveat Emptor.
October 12th, 2007 at 2:24 am
seymour: Thanks – I was going to include great literature but many of the other events seemed to overshadow them. I definitely consider some of the great modern works to be significant though.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:33 am
1903: Man Flies
1969: Man Walks On The Moon
Thats just 66 years between the two events!!! Unbelievable what man can achieve.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Shabab: that is so true – let us hope that by 2030 we have made just as big a leap forward!
October 12th, 2007 at 8:15 am
i just hope that next century there can be a list like that from the 21 century =)
October 12th, 2007 at 8:21 am
1916-easter rising
1921-republic of ireland begins
. .
\_/
October 12th, 2007 at 8:50 am
just me: hopefully with fewer wars
wha bout d irish: Does it help that the author has Irish blood?
In fact, that Irish blood is about to lead me to a nice bottle of wine for the evening!
October 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Good list. Re: “…Since the Birth of Christ”, I think it’s been shown pretty definitively that Yeshua bin Yusef, later called Christ, was born in 3 or 4 B.C. It’s counterintuitive, which is why I prefer to use B.C.E. instead of B.C. I also agree with the reasoning of evenswr that since the first millennium C.E. began on 01/01/01 (as we count it now), the third millennium C.E. began on 01/01/2001.
October 12th, 2007 at 10:16 am
I highly dout less wars but one can hope
October 12th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
What, no Irish Whiskey?
October 14th, 2007 at 12:03 am
In the 1960s… What about Woodstock? Cool list though. It must’ve been really hard coming up with only four pictures for each decade!
October 14th, 2007 at 12:14 am
Monkey: it was incredibly difficult to pick only four events. I would have liked to have done more but I was also conscious of the size of the page and loading times.
October 14th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Ianrey:
Don’t be a semantic douche.
B.C and B.C.E mean the same damn thing.
B.C. is for normal people who know (or don’t) that the calendar we use was made by Catholics that based it on what they thought was Christ’s life and death.
B.C.E. was made to pacify athiests who always seem to make a whole lot of noise for people who aren’t supposed to care…
October 15th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Hey, I’ve been going through heaps of your lists, and I have to congratulate you! They are really interesting, and I don’t think I’d be able to cope with people correcting me all the time when I’m trying to inform them, and you manage to do it and smile, so well done!
Now I shall go look at some more!
October 15th, 2007 at 4:06 am
Alex: thanks
October 18th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
As Cyn says, GL!
I think that what is more interesting than the simple fact that the millennium ended (in 2000!) was all of the Y2K hysteria. Granted, code had to be re-written to accommodate the four digits, but people were behaving like lunatics, believing that planes would fall from the skies, electricity would cease to exist and we would all suddenly be living in caves at the stroke of midnight.
To me, what is both interesting and frightening about the whole Y2K panic is not so much the fact that so many people believed it, nor that they really should have done a bit of research before wildly buying generators and a year’s supply of canned goods and bottled water. It is that all of the people that I know who were the most terrified, the ones who were convinced that civilization as we know it would end, now deny that they ever were really worried at all! I’ve had conversations with these people who’ve now informed me that they needed a generator in case of power outages anyway, and that they stayed home that night because they don’t like crowds, but they were not ever worried about Y2K. I know this to be untrue; I distinctly remember conversations with them in which they detailed their fears.
I think that this is going to be relevant historically because unfortunately, without exception, these are also the same people who are now buying into whatever fear du jour comes across their TV screen, and are willing to use that same balls to the wall approach in fighting all of their latest boogymen. Mad cow disease? Ban all beef! Pedophiles? Never, ever let your kids outside to play! Possibility of any non-white, non-Christian political leader existing anywhere in the world? Invade, and send other people’s kids over to fight them! Meanwhile, as everyone else is still trying to clean up their messes and deal with whatever ridiculous laws they’ve managed to get pushed through in their latest paranoia, they’re busy denying that they had anything to do with it, and have moved on to fear of … government healthcare! It will kill us all!
October 31st, 2007 at 12:55 am
1942-UFO crashes at Rosewell New Mexico.!!!hahahaha!!
November 11th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
1989 – The Berlin Wall is breached !
November 29th, 2007 at 8:12 am
THANK YOU!
YOU MADE MY LIFE A LOT EASIER!!!!
thanks to you, my project will not be submitted 2 weeks late!
November 29th, 2007 at 8:21 am
megg: What is your project on?
December 17th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I really enjoyed watching your valuable web site.
Thank you very much
December 18th, 2007 at 2:48 am
1990 The Persian gulf war begins.
January 1st, 2008 at 3:09 am
yes ofcourse . in 1990 PERSIAN GULF WAR STARTED NOT GULF WAR!!!!!!!!!!
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:33 am
Yes.If you study U.N DOCUMENTS ,you will see that the legal name of the gulf between Iran and Arabian Peninsula is named Persian Gulf .Please correct your mistake and respect to history
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:41 am
Please study U.N doccuments .It is Persian Gulf.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:48 am
Seyyed – irrespective of the geography, the conflict may be (and is) referred to as either the “Gulf War” or the “Persian Gulf War”. In fact, popular usage would, in my opinion, be heavily weighted towards the “Gulf War” terminology (recognising that there has, of course, been more than one conflict in that region similarly referred to as either the “Gulf War” or the “Persian Gulf War”.
In any case, I don’t see the issue with this…
January 4th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Thank you Kiwiboi,I wanted To rememberTo dear readers that, the war reffered to the Gulf war happened in the Persian Gulf region and you Know There are many gulfs in the world .for example Gulf of Mexico,Gulf of Oman,etc.
January 7th, 2008 at 6:02 am
WOWWWWWWWWWWW THAT WAS SO GREAT I ENJOYED SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
veeeeeeeeeeeeryyyyyyyyyyyyyygoooooooooooood
January 17th, 2008 at 7:26 am
um….1989-great wall of berlin?-the downfall?
not importand enough? :S
January 17th, 2008 at 7:37 am
wow,excellent.i cant stress it enough,you’re so good at compiling these lists!!!! keep up the good work
February 19th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
please correct the mistake (no war golf)= persian golf forever
thanks you
April 14th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I like this list a lot, but I really have to argue with the Stock Market Crash/Great Depression not being on the list because it is not “more significant to the average person now”.
The Great Depression eliminated many businesses in almost every industry at the time, thus eliminating competition in those fields, which led to many of the corporations that dominate today.
Plus, the New Deal, welfare system, and many of the social programs that we have today were the result of the Great Depression.
The experience of it alone is why (at least the U.S.) government has been handing out tax reliefs and other financial aid to individuals and institutions (that have worldwide investors and employees, not just American)… to prevent another Depression like that from happening.
May 18th, 2008 at 3:09 am
Cool pics. Guess a lot more could be added.
June 4th, 2008 at 7:21 am
the 20th Century was very turbulent….
September 21st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
is that gordon brown in the cold war starts pic 6th from left
is it any wonder ENGLAND is in the state it is if he’s to-ing & fro-ing through history starting the cold war. who knows what other wars he’s started
LOL GREAT LIST GREAT SITE nice 1 jfrater
January 27th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
How can you not have had the Berlin wall falling. That is up there with WW1 and WW2 as one of the biggest events of the 20th century. Not having has really made this list middeoca at best.
February 14th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
PC:i think you are right about the Berlin wall
March 20th, 2009 at 2:49 am
How about David Hasselhof singing on the berlin wall!! Now thats what I call 20th century event!
August 17th, 2009 at 10:13 am
evenswr: On Dec. 31st of this year, lots of chirpy folk on TV, looking down on Times Square and other crowded spots, will be talking about the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the Oughts of something, and the start of the second, the Teens. By your calculation, our current decade, the one ending that night, will have lasted nine years.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:02 am
I’d have to say that as I was born in 1992 and therefore only 8 at the time of the millenium I am a 21st centuary girl seeings there are still 91 years of this to go however I like your list.
October 18th, 2009 at 4:32 am
you forgot about the civil rights movement for African americans during the sixties, that is a bigger historical event than the homosexuality removal of phychiatric disorders
October 18th, 2009 at 6:23 am
the 21st century began 2001
not 2000
October 27th, 2009 at 9:23 am
1973 American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders
you have got to be shitting me.
that is ridiculous.
why was it even there in the first place?
people need to stay out of other peoples’ business, I swear.
love is blind. so shut up.
November 7th, 2009 at 3:40 am
Nice to see Australian Federation in there!
And (something that could go on to one of the ‘Facts you might not have known’ lists later, Australia is the only country that eats its national animals! You can pick up Kangaroo steaks in the supermarket.
Apparently, the two animals – the emu (that’s the bird) and the kangaroo were chosen not only beacuse they look symetrical on the crest, but also because neither of them can walk backwards.