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Foreword
“The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.”
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between
In the famous opening line of The Go-Between (1953), L. P. Hartley captures the distance between the optimism at the beginning of the twentieth century and the sense of loss occasioned by two World Wars. Hartley’s vivid metaphor offers one way of looking at another dramatic change, the change between the optimism at the end of the twentieth century and the anxiety that permeates these first years of the twenty-first century. Midway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the optimism and anticipation of the waning days of the last century seem sweet and sentimental.
My recollection of the weeks before the millennium reminds me of a response to an old snapshot: it must have been a simpler time, and it was. The major public concern in the United States was with computers and whether or not they might crash at the stroke of midnight in the year 2000. Less than ten years later, the definition of crash has taken on more ominous meanings across the world.