does "fought in" mean "go to war"here? The age, moreover, was an age of unprecedented mobility. The average nineteenth-century American never left his native state. Often he died without ever having traveled farther than thirty miles from his birthplace. Everything he saw he saw over his harness reins. His great-grandson of a hundred years later had very likely grown up in one part of the country, married a girl from a second, and was employed in a third. During the early 1940's he had fought in Africa, Europe, or Asia. Now he could easily fly from Boston to New York, say, on the hourly shuttle, or span the entire country during a short summer vacation.