In this feed, we sometimes showcase the work of producers who open a new window on history,

or remind us of what it would be useful now to remember.

This piece from The Fish Go Files, produced by WNYC, does both.

The story starts a hundred years ago.

When did humans become truly modern?

And what made us that way?

A big part of the answer is the Great War.

When it ended 100 years ago, a century of shock began.

When a war ends, it never quite ends.

It goes on in the heads of people who have experienced it.

It was in their heads, and the impact of it changed everything. Music? Oh yeah, they'd never heard

anything like it. Visual art? There is a cynicism that is ferocious. And how war itself was

memorialized. Something about that structure people responded to, thousands of people.

And the way people themselves were understood.

Sort of throwing down a line between the past and the present.

Not to mention machines.

I'm Sarah Fischko.

This is Shellshock 1919, how the Great War changed culture.

At the start, the prevailing view was that World War I would be over quite soon, in a matter

of several weeks, perhaps, or many months at most.

The fighting ended four years and tens of millions of deaths later.

And after a century, we can't stop trying to figure out the war's complicated legacy.

...