Word: pre-war
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...SPRING OF 1920 was a hard time for Joan Miro. The young Catalan had arrived in Paris from Spain in early 1919 when pre-war intellectual and artistic conceptions, like the European balance of power, had been swept away in blood and destruction of the World War. The Dada movement was the new wave in art--but only of the moment. And Miro, though he remained somewhat aloof from its influence, would come to be acknowledged as the formal master of the surrealist movement which grew as Dada disintegrated...
...soon as it became apparent that it might, for the first time since pre-war France, attract more voters than the C.P., the latter appeared less certain of its course. On the one hand, it put ostensible distance between itself and Moscow on a number of key ideological issues (such as pluralism). On the other, it did its best to cut the Socialists down, without visible success...
This passage, taken from Paul Robeson's 1958 autobiography, goes a long way toward explaining what drove and inspired this richly talented, complex man. He is now remembered by many as a sort of martyr-hero, this one-time darling of the pre-War theater and concert world who spurned wealth and acclaim abroad to return home in the early 1940s and take up the grueling, uphill fight for racial equality and justice in his native America. But here, at 60, Robeson is thinking back to his childhood; to what it was to grow up in lily-white, aristocratic Princeton...
...Rickety pre-war Dodges and Oldsmobiles traveled together with Russian tanks, cannon and the deadly Katyusha rocket launchers, incongruously accompanied by Cossack cavalrymen thrown into battle in their czarist uniforms...
...because of its composition and history, this Class of 1951 is considered normal, the world around us is not. We may be thought of now as pre-war in type, but future history may refer to our class as pre-war in actual fact. Perhaps our peaceful years at Harvard shall prove to have been only the years of prelude to another world conflict--a world conflict even more destructive of humanity than the Second World War so recently concluded. It is to guard against and prevent such a Third World War that many of us here today shall soon...