As I have argued in The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West 1900–14, the great shift into the modern age did not spring full-blown out of the trenches of the Western Front; rather, many of its elements were already in place well before 1914. Mass societies, consumerism, mass media, urbanization, big industry and big finance, feminism, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, abstract art, and atonal music all predate the beginning of the war. So why did the world suddenly seem so much more modern? Why is it that far more than a single decade seems to separate the fashions, social
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