"rosy romance" formerly directed to far more distant and immobilized images of the past. This instantaneous idealization of the jazz age suggests a shortening of historical attention, an inability to recall events beyond a single lifetime, which may help to explain another curious feature of the twentieth-century historical imagination: the growing inclination, among journalists, commentators on cultural trends, and even professional historians, to think of ten-year periods as the standard unit of historical time.

In the twenties and thirties, works of popular history began to focus on particular decades. Examples of this new genre included Meade Minnigerode's Fabulous Forties, Thomas Beer's Mauve Decade, Lewis Mumford's Brown Decades, and Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, a history of the postwar decade that appeared in 1931 and contributed to the romance of the twenties. Mumford's study of the post-Civil War era, the best of these books, sheds light on the close connection between the new preoccupation with decades and the concept of generations. It opens with a riot of imagery in which the predominant color of the period is linked to the progression of seasons. "The Civil War shook down the blossoms and blasted the promise of spring. The colors of American civilization abruptly changed. By the time the war was over, browns had spread everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black. Autumn had come." Mumford goes on to draw certain parallels between the "brown decades" and the I920s. In both cases, a disastrous war had cut off promising movements of cultural renewal and left people cynical and world-weary. After the Civil War, as in the twenties, the "younger generation had aged; and during the decade that followed the war, cynicism and disillusion were uppermost." It is for this reason, Mumford argues, that the "generation which struggled or flourished after the Civil War now has a claim upon our interest."

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