The bulk of this special issue was devoted to a series of pictorial essays, executed with the polish for which Life was justly renowned. It is interesting to see which aspects of the fifty-year history of the century the editors chose to emphasize and which they chose to ignore. There was almost nothing about politics or diplomacy, except for a reminder that the cold war confronted Americans with a challenge to which only a mature people could rise. Economic history was reduced to the history of technology, itself treated as another branch of fashion in which yesterday's technology (horsepower) was bound to be superseded, like yesterday's fashions. The same went for yesterday's movie idols (Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow), yesterday's sports heroes (Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones), and yesterday's musical comedy—though the I930s remained the "golden age of popular music." Articles on the New York Armory Show of 1913 and on more recent developments in the art world conveyed the same message: paintings that shocked the "smug and stifling calm" of the Edwardian age had now become part of the accepted modernist canon. An article on American women was illustrated by a series of fashion sketches, decade by decade, and by photographs of movie actresses and models. The history of women was thus derived entirely from changing modes of female beauty.

Articles entitled "Small Town Life" alternated with articles entitled "Acceleration of Science" and "Span of Life Grows Longer." An article called "High Society's High Jinks" depicted the activities of the Four Hundred in the "golden years before the war"—further characterized as a bygone age filled with an "adolescent spirit, boiling with the conflict between youthful naivety and mature sophistication that always marks adolescence in a man or a country. Looking back on that faraway and almost forgotten era, it takes on a soft, golden haze...." Another article featured several pages of color photographs of the Vanderbilt mansions built around the turn of the century—"They Recall the Era of Opulence." Throughout the whole issue—and throughout almost every other issue of Life that ever reached the newsstands—a celebration of technological progress, in short, alternated with sentimental retrospect: and it is exactly this counterpoint that seems most clearly to characterize the historical imagination of our time. Looking back on the history of the twentieth century from our own vantage point, we see it as a series of decades and generations, each with its own label: the lost generation, the red generation, the silent generation of the forties and early fifties, the beat

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