OK besides this below and DEVO coming out of the Kent State massacre, what are other facts you have about the evolution of art / music /etc that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know but, retroactively, explain and/or illuminate a LOT ?
Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.
British food has a reputation for boiling everything to death in part because they were one of the earliest countries to adopt coal as a cooking fuel. It's far hotter than wood and hard to "turn down", so water was used to moderate the cooking temperature.
And the reason the UK adopted coal so early is because we decimated our forests to build war ships in the early days of colonisation. And having adopted coal so early helped lead to the industrial revolution (much better for furnaces and engines than wood) which enabled the full on British empire.
My understanding is that it happened earlier- London in particular deforested the area around it very early (shortages were documented before the Black Death), and though most of the country burned wood or peat until the railroads came, London was fully coal-burning by 1600.
