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The last hundred years.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Shaw, A. Jonathan |
| Copyright Year | 1999 |
| Abstract | On 1 January 1950 I was eleven years old, sitting under what was then called the New Year’s tree. The date was a round number, and I wondered if I would ever reach the even rounder number of 1 January 2000. It seemed so far off—a whole half century away! Surely I would be dead by then. But in just the blink of an eye, here we are already at the end of the century. Now the tendency is to look back, to wonder what there is to learn from the century just passed. For the celebration of the millennium I received an insane request to select the best books of the past thousand years. A thousand years is far too long a period to make any sense. But asking questions about the past century is a different matter. A hundred years is filled by three generations at most, and many people still in early middle age remember grandparents talking to us about the very earliest years of the twentieth century. A century can exist within personal and family memory. We can try to make sense of it. I am not a “twentieth-century specialist” in the way that a historian or a sociologist or a political scientist might be. The historical facts are well known and easy enough to look up. But facts don’t come with their meaning attached, and it is the meaning that interests me. I don’t aim to repeat the work that historians have already done. My purpose is to think about the twentieth century as a writer concerned with understanding the age in which he lives. My personal history and my professional background have influenced my overall approach. I was born in Bulgaria and lived there until 1963, under a Communist regime; and since then I have lived in France. Professionally, I am a student of cultural, moral, and political history, with a special interest in the history of ideas. What counted most in the twentieth century—what allows you to make sense of it—depends of course on who you are. For an African, for example, colonization and decolonization must presumably be the decisive political events of the past hundred years. © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. |
| Starting Page | 3 |
| Ending Page | 4 |
| Page Count | 2 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1136/jramc-145-01-01 |
| PubMed reference number | 10216837 |
| Journal | Medline |
| Volume Number | 145 |
| Issue Number | 1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/p7631.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://jramc.bmj.com/content/jramc/145/1/3.full.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://rixpix.co.uk/last/hundred/last_hundred_years.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1136/jramc-145-01-01 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
