The Rose Tattoo was composed in the late 1940s, in the period following World War II, which U.S. intervention had hastened to an end with the first deployment of nuclear warheads in history, the dropping of two atomic bombs in Japan. The citizens of the many countries decimated by this war lived in its pall during the 1940s, while the United States' more peripheral involvement meant that U.S. citizens were less severely affected. U.S. culture flourished diversely in the 1940s, leading to the cultural phenomenon of the 1950s, when U.S. popular culture swept the world.

The 1940s in the United States are noteworthy for numerous developments. This was the beginning of U.S. suburban life, when developers began responding to a housing need that urban, inner-city spaces could not accommodate. These new homes, moreover, were furnished like homes never before, as household...