What the World Was Like When Your Grandparents Were Born

1915 

By 1915, New York and San Francisco had been connected by telephone, but emerging media technologies weren’t always helpful. That year, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” freshly demonized black America and breathed new life into the Ku Klux Klan. Overseas, Ottoman Turks used the cover of war to slaughter more than a million Armenian civilians in the century’s first genocide. It would not be the last.