Research Paper on:
Belief and Disbelief in an 'Accidental Century'

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
and disbelief which made the twentieth century spiritually empty" (PG). To begin, the student will want to consider what events of the twentieth century might have brought about Harringtons  skepticism? The twentieth century began with scientific knowledge being the theme for a new world order. The modernists thought that the interjection of technology into the industrialized environment  would bring mankind to a place of understanding. Instead, it opened a Pandoras box of human mistakes. The turn of the century marked the discovery of the theory  of relativity by Albert Einstein - the beginning of a new age of technological thinking. The first world war brought the concept of brutality in war to the attention  of the world while the womens movement balanced that brutality with a hope for the future in terms of the rights of women. In 1929 the world was hit  with an economic catastrophe - the stock market crashed - and with it the optimism of a burgeoning economy. The rise of fascism and Marxist communism were underlayed with  the anti-semiticism of the age. The second world war was preceded by the hope for a new world order. In the end, however, the need (greed) of expansionism  and the use of technology in the form of the atomic bomb laid waste to the concept of an egalitarian Utopia. The postwar world ushered in the rise of  consumerism as a way of life (the first indication of the global economy that was to dominate the last decade). The Civil Rights movement in the United States was  balanced by the opposition of the United States and Russia in what became known as cold war politics. It included a military escalation of atomic weaponry and a race