People’s Century: The Ordinary Men and Women Who Made the Twentieth Century PDF
Preview People’s Century: The Ordinary Men and Women Who Made the Twentieth Century
The Ordinary Men and Wo 4 Who Made the Twentieth C Godfrey Hodgson i-PT U.S.A. $60.00 Canada $84.00 CENTURY This companion volume to the spectacular twenty-six-part PBS documentary is a masterly and monumental journal of our age. It tells a riveting tale of ten tumultuous decades—not from the towering vantage point of princes and presidents but from the modest perspective of ordinary people who found themselves swept up in dramatic events of historic proportions. Some excerpts from these firsthand testimonials: On the opening of The Jazz Singer.; the film industry’s first “talkie” (1927): “We told my grandmother about the film when we came back, and she would not have it. Absolutely not. . . . She would not believe you could hear the talking.”—KATHLEEN GREEN On the great stock market crash (1929): “We saw all kinds of people walking around as though they were zombies. They thought they were rich one minute, and the next minute they weren’t rich anymore—if they had any¬ thing left at all.”—THOMAS LARKIN On the debut of television in America (1939): “I thought this is all a lot of experimental stuff, and it’s great at a World’s Fair and it’s very amusing, but it’s never going to be part of our lives.”—-JOHN O. BROWN On the air raids of World War II (1941): “There was dead silence. . . . Then the next minute, a whoosh right down through the maternity block, and the lights went out and the debris was falling down. ... I had to deliver this baby by torchlight.”—BETTY LAWRENCE On India’s independence from Great Britain (1947): “It was as though the world was new. . . . You felt you could do anything, that we were free now colonial rule was at an end.” —Birenda Kaur On the crumbling of the Berlin Wall (1989): “We just couldn’t believe it. Then we saw pictures on television ol people at the border crossing. . . . They were waving. ... It seemed impossible.”—Andreas HONTSCH On the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991): “I had such mixed feelings. All my generation had been born here under this Hag. ... It was a symbol of our life, and now it was coming down. It was frightening because it seemed like the end of everything, but it was exciting. We knew that things were changing.”—Dasha Khubova (continued on back flap) Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/peoplescentury2000hodg_0 © BBC Worldwide Limited and Godfrey Hodgson 1995,1996 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This work was originally published in two volumes in Great Britain in 1995 and 1996 by BBC Books, an imprint of BBC Worldwide Limited. This combined edition was first published in 1998. ISBN 0-8129-2843-1 Edited and designed by B-C-S Publishing Ltd, Chesterton, Oxfordshire Printed and bound in France ,V tsRftuTv 1> tjgpSsH - Colour originations BY Fotographics, Sfr /3S&5 i'JyTjf >' 'fcSw1 London - Hong Kong Set in Benrbo and Futura Random House WEBSITE ADDRESS: v,!« ■. •-•r‘a • www.randomhouse.com 98765432 First U.S. Edition From the dawn of the century to the eve of the millennium Godfrey Hodgson Series Consultant J.M. Roberts RANDOM HOUSE 4 Contents Foreword Lost Peace Total War 75 219 by J.M. Roberts 6 The inter-war years The experience of the Second World War Introduction 5 On the Line Brave New World 99 243 Age of Hope 11 The effects of mass production The Cold War years The turn of the century Sporting Fever Boomtime 123 267 Killing Fields 27 The gro wing appeal of sport The years of prosperity The experience of the First World War Breadline Freedom Now 147 291 Red Flag 51 The years of Depression The struggle for independence 5 Fallout Living Longer God Fights Back 315 435 555 The dawn of the nuclear age Campaigns for better health Religion on the rise Asia Rising Great Leap People Power 339 459 579 Economic boom in East Asia Mobilizing the people of China Collapse of the communist empire Skin Deep New Release Back to the Future 363 483 603 The fight against state racism Changing roles for young people Towards the millennium Acknowledgements Endangered Planet Half the People 618 387 507 Index 622 Campaigning for the environment Women fight for equal rights Picture Power 411 The impact of television Foreword by J.M. Roberts M ost history is not written in what we elected governments. The world has grown richer in this might call a democratic mode. It is not century, too (if it had not done so there would probably about ‘ordinary people’ — people like us. be fewer people alive today than there were in 1900). As This is both understandable and defensible. Individual more people have had access to some wealth, they have decisions by remarkable individuals, or those taken by come to matter more as consumers; whole industries people in power, can make big differences to the lives of have grown up to supply what they could be persuaded the rest of us: the course of the Second World War — and to buy. With wealth came life: huge numbers of people therefore the lives of millions of people — might have now live much longer than their great-grandparents’ been wholly different if Hitler had not decided to go to generation. In many parts of the world mass education war formally with the United States. Much time and became available for the first time in this century, with attention has been given by historians to powerful or incalculable effects on wants, the way people saw those distinguished men and women and to the things they wants, and their visions of what might be possible. Mass did, and rightly so. communication (particularly, in the second half of the But there is a sense, too, in which history cannot century, television) led to more shared experience: events but be concerned with the lives of anonymous millions, that would once have had only a local or at most a as well as those of the great shapers of events. Individuals regional impact suddenly took on global significance. are historically important because of the impact they have When the television series on which this book has had on the lives of huge numbers of their fellow human been based was devised, it was hoped that it would bring beings. History is the story of what has been done by and to a large audience a historical emphasis that would show made a difference to human beings. The more of them just what was this unique new feature of the twentieth that have been affected, the more historically important century. Even if the involvement of ‘peoples’ in history the events, influences and decisions that shape the story in a new way was already foreshadowed before 1900, its are. That is how historical importance is measured; I mass character is clearer than ever as the year 2000 know of no other way. approaches. Huge numbers of men and women have Perhaps this has become more obvious during the been caught up in processes that transform their lives. present century. Not only have there been many more As the people’s century draws to a close, it is clear people than before on whom its events have played, that even more change is on the way: a prospect that, sometimes with terrible effect, but we know more about depending on where you stand, may seem inspiring, them than about their predecessors in more distant times. intimidating, exciting, liberating, oppressive or many More important still, a number of processes have been other things. Many of the changes will turn out to have going forward — some political, some technological, deep roots in the past. There will be nearly six billion some economic — all of which have tended to give large human beings alive in the year 2000. We should not be numbers of people a more active role in events, or at any too confident that we can guess what their future will be, rate the illusion of one. More and more countries have, but it will have a lot of history mixed up in it, including for instance, at least formally become democracies, with unfinished business of our own.
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