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GUÐNITH. JÓHANNESSON
Summary
This review artícle looks at five works on twentieth-century history which
have been published within the last few years:
Glover, Jonathan, Huhianity. A Moral History of the Twentieth History
(London, 1999).
Hobsbawm, Eric, Age ofExtremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
(London, 1994).
Howard, Michael, and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History ofthe
Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1998).
Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Harmonds-
worth, 1998).
Roberts, J.M., Twentieth Century. The History of the World 1901 to 2000
(Harmondsworth, 1999).
It begins with a discussion of the authors' tíme frame and definitions of
the „twentieth century". While Roberts adheres meticulously to the cen-
tury proper, from 1901 to 2000, Howard and Louis maintain that the cen-
tury started a year before, in 1900, and the various authors usually only
cover events and developments up to 1990 or so. Glover, taking a philo-
sophical approach to the cruellest wars and atrocities of the century, does
not define a clear start and end, but the First World War is his first histor-
ical point of departure and in chronological terms he ends his bleak sur-
vey in Rwanda and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Mazower takes his narrative
almost up the tíme of publication but starts only in the wake of the First
World War. The omission of that conflict seems surprising, since his aim
was to write about the „Dark Continent" and its most dreadful moments
in the twentieth century. Hobsbawm's delimitation, „the short twentíeth
century" from 1914 to 1991, seems to be most sensible.
While the works of Roberts and Howard/Louis offer a solid overview
of the century's most important developments, they are not as thought-
provoking as is Glover's focus on human nature and Mazower's pes-
simistic but fresh approach to the interwar period and the deep weak-
nesses of democracy in Europe. Similarly, Hobsbawm's tour de force is
splendid, but coloured by his political and theoretical convictions. This is
perhaps most evident in his conclusion and gloomy predictions about a
future under a self-destroying, capitalist system. The authors also demon-
strate well that the twentieth century was in many ways a „Western" cen-
tury, with the ever-increasing presence of a global culture. Yet they try to
avoid looking at world events from a solely Westem perspectíve.
The stark difference between historiography at the beginning of the
twentieth century and today is also discussed. Long gone is the self-con-
fidence of historians who treated the unearthing of primary sources like