Here is a distinctly American Modern — a culture born of new technology and echoing out of the mind of a child growing up in a world newly transformed. The word modern infused that world. Everyone used it. Everyone knew what it meant. No one knew what it meant. The way to understanding any epoch is by reclaiming its peculiar texture. Yet the Modern that we all saw at the time was misleading. It was a world dancing with new X-rays, radium, and radio waves — Art Deco and Bauhaus, skyscrapers and Burma-Shave signs. Modern was the now-abandoned Teepee Motel down in Wharton County, Texas, and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. It was Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis and Buck Rogers. We last saw Modern speeding off into the mists of the fifties on great automobile tailfins. Yet there had to be more to it than that! Science was surely a red thread running through Modern. As relativity theory and quantum mechanics departed from everything we had believed to constitute reality, it was clear that nothing would remain the same — that we faced change of a magnitude hitherto unimaginable.

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