History of the Twentieth Century

The concise edition of Martin Gilbert's History of the Twentieth Century is the culmination of his magisterial three-volume series, now elegantly woven together into a single text. This definitive narrative history documents significant events across the globe from 1900 through 1999. Gilbert, author of the multivolume biography of Winston Churchill and other brilliant works of history, chronicles world events year by year, from the dawn of aviation to the flourishing technology age, taking us through World War I to the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States and Hitler as chancellor of Germany, and continuing on to document wars in South Africa, China, Ethiopia, Spain, Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, apartheid, the arms race, the moon landing, and the dawn of the computer age. He moves from the Hungarian revolution to Poland's solidarity movement to Ireland's Bloody Sunday and Israel's confrontations with the Palestinians; from Pol Pot's Cambodia to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As always, Gilbert intersperses the influence of art, literature, music, and religion, as well as highlighting both man-made and natural disasters, to further enliven this vivid work. This is a rich, textured look at war, celebration, suffering, life, death, and renewal in the century gone by. The result is nothing less than extraordinary.