ABSTRACT
Americans of the twenties were rarely conscious of how unique a society they lived in, although they boasted that it was the best. The twenties have lent themselves to extravagant foreshortening since they are years set off sharply on one side by the first of the world wars and on the other by the greatest of American depressions. The decade has seemed a sort of accidental pause in history, much of it remembered as if it were a wilful, elegant sport of time. The simplicity of the faith and its ignorance were to be special qualities of the American society in the first decade of their prominence in world history. The decade was a pause between two upheavals, a war and a depression. America began to be self-conscious, and the whole world was witness. Some of the fruits of this new American self-consciousness were to have vitality and to carry an American way across all the oceans.
