Lichtenstein, a pioneer of postmodern recycling, swiped the subject of his mural from a beloved masterpiece of German painting — Oskar Schlemmer’s “Bauhaus Stairway,” of 1932, which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art. The painting depicts an actual staircase at the Bauhaus, the progressive art school that opened in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, and exemplified the modern movement at its most extroverted and techno-friendly. Artists claimed a bond with designers and engineers and set out to repair the world.

One large study by Ben D. Woodand Frank N. Freeman in 1932 paved theway for acceptance in elementary schools.The study included 14,947 children ofelementary-school age in an experimenton the effect of the typewriter on class-room performance (3). The children whohad typing instruction actually spent onlyan hour or two a week at the typewriter,yet at the end of the first year they out-performed the nontyping pupils in read-ing.

In a set of groundbreaking studies in 1932, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told volunteers a Native American legend about a young man who hears war cries and, pursuing them, enters a dreamlike battle that eventually leads to his real death. Bartlett asked the volunteers, who were non-Native, to recall the rather confusing story at increasing intervals, from minutes to years later. He found that as time passed, the rememberers tended to distort the tale's culturally unfamiliar parts such that they were either lost to memory or transformed into more familiar things.