Timeline 1900-2021, part 1: intro & 1900-1909
Melies, still from A Trip to the Moon, 1902.

Timeline 1900-2021, part 1: intro & 1900-1909

Starting this week: 12 posts with an illustrated decade-by-decade timeline for the years 1900 to 2021. This week’s installment covers 1900-1909. For more on the timeline and a link to the book on Amazon, see here. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/sDxsBNJOvTQ.

The goal of the timeline

Few of us are completely happy with the world as it is. But to change the future, you have to know the past. What actually happened? What ideas drove those events? The ideas are revealed not only in political slogans, but in such things as how business is regarded, what areas science is exploring, and what’s popular in fiction, visual arts, architecture, film, and music.

This timeline, with a multitude of illustrations, is meant as a scaffolding on which you can build a better understanding of the past and the present … which will increase your odds of changing the future.

The timeline will appear as an 8.5 x 11″ full-color book in August or September 2022.

Sections

Each decade includes the following sections:

  • Events worldwide that had a strong impact on the United States.
  • Politics & culture in the US, including a representative quote from each US president.
  • Economics, including inflation, recessions and depressions, and leading sectors of the US economy.
  • Science & Technology, with subsections (when applicable) on transportation, communication, energy, medicine, food, military, genetics, environmentalism, theoretical science, and inventions.
  • Books: bestsellers and cutting-edge works.
  • Visual Arts: sections for painting and sculpture, each divided into popular and cutting-edge.
  • Architecture: sections on popular and cutting-edge.
  • Film: top-grossing movies, TV, and video games.
  • Music: most popular songs year by year, most popular albums, styles, dances, musical theater, technology, and traditional and cutting-edge orchestral works.

1900-1909

The first decade of the twentieth century includes, among much, much else:

  • Politics worldwide: The Invasion of China by US, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian troops.
  • Politics in the US: a quote from the president of the US praising economic competition
  • US Cabinet positions as of 1903
  • Economics: Percentage of GDP consumed by federal government ca. 1900
  • Science & technology: US undertakes construction of Panama Canal
  • Books: Upton Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of meatpacking in Chicago, which led to the creation of the FDA
  • Painting and sculpture: Whistler, Sargent, Saint Gaudens, Brancusi. (For this decade I include a few earlier art works, to help set the context.)
  • Architecture: Hunt’s Biltmore and Wright’s Robie House
  • Film: Méliès, A Trip to the Moon
  • Music: Ragtime, marches, and Tin Pan Alley. Cutting-edge orchestral works: Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question calls for 3 groups of musicians playing at different tempos, with different conductors.
McKinley campaign poster, ca. 1896. Theodore Roosevelt in a steam shovel at the Panama Canal. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906.
Saint Gaudens, Sherman Monument, 1903. Brancusi, The Kiss, 1907-1908. Joplin, “The Entertainer,” 1902. Melies, still from A Trip to the Moon, 1902.

Feedback I’d appreciate from you on the PDF of 1900-1909

  • Have I listed all the most significant events for this decade? Space is limited and there’s room for disagreement, but do tell me if you think anything important is missing. In case you want to add events important to you, I’ve allowed some blank space on every set of facing pages.
  • I have not read all the books I mention nor listened to all the musical styles. Are any of the facts or descriptions wrong? Corrections welcome.
  • I’d like to include major events in areas such as education, psychology, Supreme Court decisions, and sports. If you can boil down those or similar fields to a half-dozen significant events from 1900 to 2021, send them to me and I’ll try to work them in.
  • Of course, point out typos, bad grammar, messy syntax, and so on.

More

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