Research Paper on:
Age of Extremes by Hobsbawm

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
twentieth century. For the most part he succeeds as he plunges through World War II, globalization, the influence of radio and changes in art and science. Hobsbawn leaves little to  the imagination and within the text, there is an analysis of life in the twentieth century. The rather objective, but sometimes dismal view of the planet during a time of  great change is informative. Although Hobsbawm clearly has a thesis, he does try to include many ordinary facts so that in part, the book serves as a historical document. Hobsbawm  talks about the Great Depression and devotes a lot of pages to discuss the devastation and despair of this period. One gets a sense of what it was like to  live through the stock market crash of 1929 for example. This is an important topic especially because many people alive today can remember growing up during this difficult time in  economic history. He also writes about decolonization, another significant trend in the twentieth century. It is as if an era--that had endured for centuries-- has come to and end with  the end of colonization and the author delves into a variety of aspects in this domain. A great deal of attention is placed on governmental ideologies such as communism and  socialism and he goes through the rise and fall of those. He at the beginning focuses on the Russian Revolution but also does not neglect the advent of socialism.  This work is not entirely chronological, but it is broken into three broad sections, the first of which is entitled The Age of Catastrophe which evaluates a great deal of  economic and political variables during the first half of the twentieth century. The second is called The Golden Age and details several political and social revolutions, inclusive of the concepts