The Twentieth Century World
Girls with Barbies, East Harlem / Camilo Jose Vergara, Library of Congress
Studying a century of global change
The twentieth-century was marked by rapid transformation, conflict and connection. Wars reshaped borders. Empires collapsed. New nations emerged. Technology accelerated communication and industry. Social movements challenged power and inequality. At UB, faculty and students study individual regions and nations while placing them within global, comparative and transnational contexts. This research helps explain how ideas, technologies and movements crossed borders and reshaped societies worldwide.
Great for students interested in war and diplomacy, migration, social movements, urban change, public policy or global political transformation.
Research on the twentieth-century world explores questions such as:
- How did global wars reshape nations and political systems?
- How did decolonization transform world politics?
- How did migration and urbanization redefine identity and belonging?
- How did authoritarian regimes rise and operate?
- How did public policy respond to social inequality?
- How did gender, race and disability shape modern institutions?
These questions connect modern history to the world we inhabit today.
Historians of the twentieth-century draw on diverse sources, including:
- Government and diplomatic records
- Policy documents and legal cases
- Newspapers and mass media
- Personal correspondence and oral histories
- Urban planning and institutional archives
Faculty use international and comparative approaches to trace how global processes played out in everyday life. Research often connects political structures to lived experience, examining how individuals and communities responded to inequality, power and change.
Students gain tools to analyze modern history while understanding its continuing impact.
These interconnected areas reflect the department’s breadth across themes and regions, offering students multiple pathways into the study of twentieth-century transformation.
This research examines how ideas about masculinity, femininity and sexual identity shaped politics, labor, family life and culture. Faculty explore how these ideas evolved in response to war, social movements and global change.
Faculty working in this area:
Alfred Palmer, "Rosie the Riveter"
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Sports history examines athletics as a space where race, gender, nationalism and identity are negotiated. Faculty study how sports both reflected and influenced political and social change.
Faculty working in this area:
Canadian tennis players, 1920.
Public Domain Wikimedia Commons
This research explores regulation, addiction and social attitudes toward substances. Faculty connect this work to broader questions of public health, law and reform.
Faculty working in this area:
People's Drug Store located at 8th and H Streets, NE in Washington, D.C.
Public Domain Wikimedia Commons
Faculty examine fascism and other forms of authoritarian rule as global and transnational phenomena. Research explores ideology, state power and international networks to understand how these regimes emerged and operated.
Faculty working in this area:
Parade of Nazi Troops, 1935, Nuremberg.
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
This area studies punishment, confinement and perceptions of deviance. Faculty examine how systems of discipline intersected with gender, sexuality, disability and race in the modern world.
Faculty working in this area:
The Indiana Reformatory
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
UB is a leader in disability history. Faculty explore how societies defined disability and how disabled people experienced institutions, care and community throughout the twentieth-century.
This work centers lived experience and challenges assumptions about normalcy and access.
Faculty working in this area:
Patients at a sanitorium in Indiana, 1926
Wellcome Collection
Urban history examines the growth of cities and the lives of the people who shaped them. Faculty study housing, labor, migration and culture to understand how urban spaces reflected broader political and social change.
Faculty working in this area:
New York City skyline, 1975.
Library of Congress.
This research examines how governments responded to social needs and how political and cultural forces shaped decision-making. Faculty connect public policy to urban change, social reform and institutional development.
Faculty working in this area:
Cabrini Green Housing Project, Chicago.
Public Domain Wikimedia Commons
Students can engage the twentieth-century world through coursework and research seminars, independent study, archival and digital research projects or public-facing history initiatives