Death rates in the 20th century 1 year old. In 1999, at the end of the century, the infant mortality rate in the United States declined more than 90% to 7.2 deaths per 1,000 live births. Similarly, maternal mortality rates declined almost 99% to less than 0.1 reported deaths per 1,000 live births. There are a variety of causes for this steep decline in death rates in the 20th century: Despite these tremendous decreases in infant mortality and maternal mortality, the 20th century experienced significant disparities between minority death rates compared to death rates for white mothers. In the 1900s, black women were twice as likely
New materials in 20th-century art Delaunay and scores of young artists in Paris made their first modern paintings venturing toward abstraction and other new ways of formulating figurative, still-life and landscape imagery. During the first decade of the 20th century modern art developed simultaneously in several different areas in Europe (France, England, Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, Italy), and in the United States. Artists began to formulate different directions of modern art, seemingly unrelated to one another. In printmaking, the linocut was invented by the artists of Die Brücke in Germany between 1905 and 1913. At first they described their prints as woodcuts, which sounded more respectable.