1903: Future Shock

George Orwell is born in Motihari, India

Author George Orwell would often dress in old clothes and live in poorer sections of town to understand how people in different economic and social classes behaved. These experiences not only helped him write Down and Out in Paris and London, but they also influenced his sense of social justice for all.

Orwell wrote his satire Animal Farm as an allegory, with talking farm animals standing in for people. His hope was to argue the dangers of Stalin’s totalitarianism rising in the Soviet Union. In 1984, Orwell envisioned a future world in which human rights were non-existent and the government exercised thought control over its citizens. Orwell’s fertile imagination took us to some scary places even as they reminded us of the dignity of the common man.