How did intellectual developments reflect the general crisis in Western thought?
TTHE DECADES SURROUNDING THE FIRST WORLD WAR— from the 1880s to the 1930s — brought intense cultural and intellectual experimentation. As people grappled with the costs of the First World War and the difficulty of postwar recovery, philosophers and scientists questioned and even abandoned many of the cherished values and beliefs that had guided Western society since the eighteenth-
Unlocking the Power of the AtomMany of the fanciful visions of science fiction came true in the twentieth century, although not exactly as first imagined. This 1927 Swedish reprint of a drawing by American cartoonist Robert Fuller satirizes a pair of professors who have split the atom and unwittingly destroyed their building and neighborhood in the process. In the Second World War, professors indeed harnessed the atom in bombs and decimated faraway cities and foreign civilians. (Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works)