Top Results for 20TH Century

Worn during the first crewed lunar landing in 1969, Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 spacesuit is an A7L pressure suit manufactured by ILC Industries, now known as ILC Dover. Its layered construction maintained a pressurized environment and helped protect against temperature extremes and micrometeoroids....

Anne Frank's diary survives in notebooks and loose pages written by a Jewish teenager during World War II. Her entries from 1942 to 1944 record life before and during hiding in German-occupied Amsterdam, including daily tensions and family relationships. Wartime events appear alongside reflections o...

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) helped transform twentieth-century art by questioning how a picture represents its subject. Together with Georges Braque, he pioneered Cubism, using fragmented forms and multiple viewpoints to move beyond a single fixed perspective. His intensely productive...

Originally written as a ballet score, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913 and became a central work of musical modernism. Its scenario depicts imagined pagan rituals culminating in a chosen young woman's sacrificial dance. Changing accents and repeated rhythmic figures give the or...

Vinton Cerf is an American computer scientist and engineer who co-designed the TCP/IP protocols with Bob Kahn during the 1970s. TCP/IP provides the basic rules for addressing and transferring data across interconnected networks, making it central to the modern Internet. Cerf also helped establish th...

A Ukrainian-American engineer, Stephen Timoshenko helped establish much of the framework used to study how engineering structures deform, vibrate, and carry loads. His work covered elasticity and structural analysis, connecting mathematical treatment with problems faced in the design of machines and...

Born in Switzerland and later based in France, Le Corbusier helped define twentieth-century modernist architecture and urban planning. Villa Savoye expresses his interest in buildings raised on columns, open interior arrangements and a close relationship between architecture and movement. His book T...

Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993) helped turn continental drift into a more complete account of how the Earth's surface moves. During the 1960s, he proposed mantle hotspots as an explanation for volcanic island chains such as Hawaii. He also introduced transform faults, showing how...

The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca is a bilingual edition that presents Spanish originals alongside English translations. Edited by Christopher Maurer, the volume draws on the work of multiple translators and is organized chronologically to reflect the poet's career. It includes works from...

Mikrokosmos, Sz. 107, is a collection of 153 progressive piano pieces completed by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók in 1939. The pieces were written as pedagogical exercises, starting with simple beginner studies and advancing to complex works suited for professional pianists. The collection integrate...

Glass and steel became tools for architectural clarity in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The German-born architect later worked in the United States, helping shape twentieth-century modernism through buildings with disciplined proportions and carefully expressed structure. His designs make th...

La Valse is an orchestral work by Maurice Ravel, completed in 1920. Originally conceived as a ballet, the piece is subtitled a choreographic poem and evokes the culture of Vienna through the structure of a waltz that becomes increasingly dissonant and chaotic. Ravel described the work as a tribute t...

'The Waste Land and Other Poems' is a literary collection by American-British poet T.S. Eliot, featuring works published in the early 1920s. The titular long poem is a fragmented, multi-lingual narrative that captures the disillusionment of post-World War I society. The text serves as a foundational...

Orville and Wilbur Wright were American inventors whose work established a practical foundation for powered aviation. Their successful flights in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, demonstrated sustained, controlled flight in a powered heavier-than-air aircraft. The achieve...

Color and carefully controlled light give Luis Barragán's architecture much of its emotional character. The Mexican architect, who lived from 1902 to 1988, developed a personal approach to twentieth-century modernism in which simple forms create spaces for quiet attention. Walls can both frame a vie...

Working under the name Madame Grès, French couturier Germaine Émilie Krebs developed clothing closely associated with sculptural draping. Her Grecian-inspired evening gowns, particularly those made from silk jersey, used fine pleats and controlled folds to shape the body. The fabric itself supplied...

Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano are a collection of rhythmically intricate compositions written primarily from the late 1940s onward for the reproducing piano. Nancarrow, an American-born composer who spent much of his career in Mexico City, created these works by punching holes directly...

Published in 1985, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West follows a teenage runaway known as the Kid into the company of scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton. Much of the central action takes place around the United States-Mexico border in 1849 and 1850. Its historical...

Anatoly Zaliznyak (1935–2017) was a Russian linguist specializing in structural linguistics, morphology, and the study of Old Novgorodian dialects. His 1977 'Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language' became a foundational reference work for morphological analysis of Russian. Zaliznyak was also...

Béla Bartók’s *Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta* is a landmark composition from 1911. It showcases innovative use of percussion instruments, particularly the celesta, to evoke Hungarian folk music elements. The work's unique textures and rhythmic complexity established Bartók as a leading f...

Norwegian mineralogist and geologist Victor Moritz Goldschmidt helped establish modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry during the early twentieth century. His research addressed why chemical elements occur in particular minerals and parts of the Earth, bringing chemical behavior into the interpre...

The Cold War was a prolonged geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated international relations from the late 1940s until the latter's dissolution in 1991. Characterized by an absence of direct, large-scale military conflict between the two superpowers, the st...

Published in French in 1913, Swann's Way opens Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. It moves between the narrator's childhood memories around Combray and the unhappy love affair of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy. These strands introduce a work concerned with how experience c...

Winston Churchill served as Britain's prime minister during much of the Second World War and returned to the office after the war. Taking charge in 1940, he helped sustain resistance to Nazi Germany at a time when Britain faced invasion and military setbacks. His speeches combined direct accounts of...

A carefully painted pipe sits above the French words 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe', meaning 'This is not a pipe', in René Magritte's The Treachery of Images. The apparent contradiction draws attention to a simple distinction: a painted representation of an object cannot perform the object's function. It...

Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was central to De Stijl, a movement that sought a pared-down visual language for art and design. His mature abstract paintings use black horizontal and vertical lines with areas of red, blue and yellow, alongside white and other neutral tones. The apparent sim...

The Space Race was a Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve milestones in spaceflight and rocketry. It was catalyzed by the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957, and further intensified when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin...

Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (1886–1962), known in Russian as Mikhail Vasmer, was a linguist and Slavist born in Saint Petersburg who pursued his academic career in Germany. His Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, published in three volumes between 1953 and 1958, systematically traces the origins o...

Complex natural molecules were the central challenge of Robert Burns Woodward's career. This twentieth-century American organic chemist became known for total synthesis, the construction of a target molecule from simpler starting materials. His work included landmark syntheses involving strychnine,...