Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...20s ended traumatically, for almost everyone. In 1929 Hadden came down with a strep infection that reached his heart and killed him at age 31. Luce was left to carry on alone. The stock market crashed a few months later...
...20s, American painters, sculptors and architects still defined themselves largely in terms of European models, whether of "traditional" art or of Modernism. But the decade also saw the emergence of a genius of American design who was perhaps the greatest architect of the century: Frank Lloyd Wright. The decade's supreme collective artifact, in steel and stone, was, of course, Manhattan itself, with its immense towers--Chrysler, Empire State and the rest--rising like blasts of congealed and shining energy from the bedrock, a spectacle of Promethean ambition and daring...
Institutional novelty was the American way, and the '20s created institutions that would have seemed contradictions in terms in Paris or London: a Museum of Modern Art, for instance, which opened in 1929. New York City was turning into an international culture, which would make it a natural haven for artists and intellectuals displaced by Nazism in the '30s--whose presence, in turn, would help make the city into Modernism's center of gravity in the '50s. New York was the world's "shock city," and would remain so for decades to come--not least because it harbored such cultural...
...innumerable variants but also what happened onstage, across the airwaves and on the movie screen. America took the European operetta, fused it with burlesque and jazz and created--through the genius of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and others--a broad, unique musical form. The '20s saw the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which had grown from its humble origins among (mostly immigrant Jewish) nickelodeon proprietors into the most powerful industry for the invention and spread of dreams in human history, at least until the advent of TV. Walt Disney invented a little mouse...
...strain of influenza persisted into the '20s, then disappeared, or lost its virulence and faded into the great jigsaw of constantly reassorting viruses. Until lately, the epidemic had almost disappeared from our collective memory as well, prompting Crosby to title his history The Forgotten Epidemic. Among flu experts, however, its mysteries are still current and utterly significant. It has always stood as a vivid warning of what the next pandemic could be like. What made the virus so lethal? Why was it able to kill so quickly? And where in nature did it originate...