Paul Rosenberg – 1910 was well before my own time, of course, but I knew at least ten people who lived through it as adults, and discussed the era at some length with one of them, my great uncle Dave. And so this is an era I feel I can still reach out and touch.

One of the more interesting things about this era regards our separation from it. The great event that forged this divide was World War I, which is greatly under-appreciated in modern discourse. Schools cover World War II in great depth, but run through World War I fairly quickly. World War I, however – “The Great War” – changed human affairs and human consciousness far more than World War II did. The world before and the world afterward were very different places. Continue reading →