In my upcoming nano I'm writing about a period from 1872 to the end of World War I in 1918. But the story doesn't involve the war, (insomuch as the actual fighting, though obviously it impacts daily life greatly.) Anyway, I desperately need information about daily life during this time period!
So, what would life be like, say for a boy growing up in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries?
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Writing is like the evolution of some weird octupus. It starts out great, some cool camoflauge, then suddenly it's got eight legs and has stolen your pen and started writing. I wanted to write seriously, but the Plotpus took over and Then There Were Ninja




206 / 50,000
Mrt 15, 2008 - 17 34
If he was in the United States we did not enter The Great War (now know as World War I) until 1917, so for us the war was much shorter.
There was an epidemic of enfluenza around 1918 in which a lot of people died. My Grandmother told me people were dropping like flies. (She was a teen ager at that time).
80,001 / 50,000
Mrt 27, 2008 - 18 22
I've just remembered a pretty good book I recently read (I think it's by Ken Follett?) called Winter. It's about a German family, and while it doesn't go back to the 1870s, it covers from about 1900 to 1945 pretty well, and talks about the childhood of two boys in the titular family from 1900 to 1914. I haven't read it in a while, but I think it may serve your purposes pretty well, depending on which country yours is set in.
----------Senioritis -- Four men in a coffeeshop. They write a novel.
Echo Flux -- Peasant girl saves the world with SCIENCE!
(That was NaNo 07. Screnzy?)
Ballroom Blitz -- The kind of highly-meta play that gets written by a student in Tech Theatre.