In my highly compressed account of early 20th century history, I would be remiss to fail to note the increasing power of women in social, economic and political change. The shortage of men during and after WWI meant that women had to take on roles formerly dominated by men. When women banded together so that their voices were heard in the temperance movement and the struggle for voting rights, things changed. And they continue to change.
In addition to the expanded power of women in collective life, there were numerous and momentous developments in the arts and sciences. I'll mention just a few.
In art, there was Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, the surrealists including Salvador Dali, and many others. In writing there was Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jean Paul Sartre, Fredrick Nietze, Albert Camus, and many more.
In music, Igor Stravinsky, George Gerwhin, Claude Debussy, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Jean Sibelius, Scott Joplin, and many more.
Many influential musicians appeared in these years. In American music, and popular music worldwide, few were more influential than Louis Armstrong in Jazz, Robert Johnson in Blues, and Hank Williams in Country music.
In the sciences, it was one breakthrough after another. It is perhaps impossible to overstate the importance of Marie Curie or the price she paid for her accomplishments. The list is long. Her efforts to get radiography equipment to wounded soldiers in WWI saved lives and limbs. Her experiments and breakthroughs with radiation helped to lay the foundation for later work in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields, physics and chemistry, an achievement only matched by one other person, Linus Pauling.
Most likely her exposure to radiation led to later illness and early death. Even during her life there was reluctance to recognize her efforts. She was pilloried for her personal life in ways that no man would ever be.
Many more women have also contributed to scientific advancement but they have been chronically under-recognized. Only very recently has this begun to change.
No scientist was more famous or influential than Albert Einstein whose groundbreaking paper on special relativity was published in 1905 along with three other papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the equivalence of mass and energy.
Einstein contributed to quantum mechanics (the most accurately predictive scientific theory so far) along with Wernet Heisenberg, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, John von Neumann, Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman and many others.
As everyone knows, these scientific developments led to the atomic bomb and the harnessing of atomic power for the generation of electricity.
There is a similarly long list of innovations and breakthroughs in the life sciences. Among the most significant are the developments of vaccines and antibiotics. Before flu vaccines were available, the so-called Spanish flu spread worldwide during the WWI years and killed many more people than combat did. Smallpox, measles and mumps were constant threats. Bacterial infections meant that even a minor wound could be fatal. Penicillin, the first widely available antibiotic, saved many lives and limbs during WWII.
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The economic and political world I surveyed in the earlier email mattered then and matters now. Yet the artistic, scientific, and technological changes which have accelerated and multiplied exponentially throughout the entire 20th Century have arguably been the most powerful factors improving human life.