• Rolando@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    the looming threat of WW1 breaking out.

    Everything else you said sounds true, but in Illinois and Ohio where Condo (and presumably Everett) lived, this barely registered as a possibility. Even in Europe, the general consensus was that another European war would be as brief as the Franco-Prussian War (6 months), if not the Austro-Prussian War (5 weeks).

    This isn’t my area, but I think a lot of the stresses that Everett react to are due to the rapid urbanization that the US was experiencing at the time. Specifically, people moving from farms to cities, and immigrants arriving principally from Europe; cities growing larger and people having to learn new ways of getting along.