The glory days of advertising are yet to come. We're talking . . . soap. And collars. Ads from the Oughts, here. From the Teens, start here.
     
 

Scoop, Briggs - and a few others to come eventually. For 2020, it was one of the best - Webby.

     
 

Newspaper features.

Bygone Movie Stars.
     
 

The early years. Go HERE.

   

 
 

A song per year, chosen almost entirely at random from my collection.

   

 
 

 

Welcome to terra incognita.

What? you say. Hardly. Why, I know a lot about the era. That’s why I’m here. Good for you! But you’re unique. For most people, the first two decades of the 20th century are a vague smear that ends with the First World War - and even that isn’t recollected in full. We showed up late, and won? Right?

Well, it’s a bit more than that. In fact the first two decades were incredibly complex, and the world of 1920 didn’t just pop into existence with jazz and skyscrapers and airplanes and the rest of the manifestations of the modern world.

All of the decade categories are rather arbitrary, of course. One year’s traditions and innovations bled into the next. It’s wrong to put the Oughts and the Tens into the same category, since 1919 was quite different from 1901, but I don’t have enough material to justify two sites, so I’m lumping it all together and committing a sin equal to thinking that 1919 and 1920 were completely different.

This site has the least amount of material in the Decades Project, because there must wasn’t as much stuff, and what there was didn’t survive at the same rate as, say, 1960s cookbooks. But it’ll do.

As I said, welcome to terra incognita - and prepare to be surprised by how much seems familiar.

 

Lileks

--03.20.2020