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Jazz Ages
Jazz bands played at dance halls like the Savoy in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor. -
Christian faith
The First Great Awakening, the nation's first major religious revival in the middle of the 18th century injected new vigor into Christian faith. Religion in the period of the Second Great Awakening became increasingly involved in social reform movements, such as anti-slavery. -
Passage of the Prohibition Amendment
In 1917, after the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson instituted a temporary wartime prohibition in order to save grain for producing food. That same year, Congress submitted the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors, for state ratification. Though Congress had stipulated a seven-year time limit for the process, the amendment received the support of the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states. -
Dust Bowl 2
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living -
UK Politics
In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was established and it changed its name to The Labour Party in 1906. After the First World War, this led to the demise of the Liberal Party as the main liberal force in British politics. The existence of the Labour Party on the left of British politics led to a slow waning of energy from the Liberal Party, ending with it taking third place in national politics. After performing poorly in the elections of 1922, 1923 and 1924. -
Italian Politics
The Italian economy also fell into a deep slump following World War I. Anarchists were endemic, Communist and other Socialist agitators abounded among the trade unions, and many were gravely worried that a Bolshevik-style Communist revolution was imminent. After a number of liberal governments failed to rein in these threats, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy invited Benito Mussolini to form a government on October 29, 1922. -
Indian Politics
Mohandas (later, Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948) who was a lawyer turned politician in the Indian National Congress party began his national campaign to rally the populace of India to use passive resistance and noncooperation against the occupying British colonialist government. Gandhi tried to unite Muslims and Hindus in obtaining independence from Great Britain using peaceful means. -
U.S Politics
By the 1920s, many Americans had grown tired of war and constant attempts at reform, including numerous attempts to pass moral legislation. Many people longed for a simpler way of life. Warren G. Harding's policy of a "return to normalcy" was an attempt to capitalize on this populist feeling. -
Economic Growth and Output
The economy grew 42 percent during the 1920s. The United States produced nearly half the world's output. That's because World War I destroyed most of Europe. New construction almost doubled, from $6.7 billion to $10.1 billion. Aside from the economic recession of 1920-21, where by some estimates unemployment rose to 11.7 percent, for the most part unemployment in the 1920s never rose above the natural rate of around 4 percent. -
Stock Market
On average, the stock market increased in value by 20 percent a year. It began rising in 1924. The number of shares traded doubled to 5 million per day. One reason for the boom was because of financial innovations. Stockbrokers began allowing customers to buy stocks "on margin." Brokers would lend 80-90 percent of the price of the stock. Investors only needed to put down 10-20 percent. If the stock price went up, they became millionaires. -
Banking
Only one-third of the nation's 24,000 banks belonged to the Federal Reserve System. Non-members relied on each other to hold reserves. That was a significant weakness. It meant they were vulnerable to the bank runs that occurred in the 1930s. Another weakness was that banks held fictitious reserves. Checks were counted as reserves before they cleared. As a result, these checks were double-counted by the sending bank and the receiving bank. -
Volstead Act
On January 16, 1920, the Volstead Act prohibited the sale, manufacture, or transport of any alcoholic beverages. That led to an underground economy as people flouted the law. It also created a monopoly for gangsters such as Chicago's Al Capone. -
Consumer Goods
U.S. prosperity soared as the manufacturing of consumer goods increased. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators became everyday household items. Sixty percent of families bought radios. By 1922, 60 radio stations broadcast everything from news to music to weather reports. Most of them used expanded credit offered by a booming banking industry. -
Birth of Mass Culture
During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the U.S., Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. -
New Women
The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. -
The cultural civil war
Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people in places like Indiana and Illinois joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. -
Prohobition
During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5% alcohol. -
Mrs Dalloway and the First World War
Mrs Dalloway, which takes place on one day in June 1923, shows how the First World War continued to affect those who had lived through it, five years after it ended. David Bradshaw explores the novel's commemoration of the dead and evocations of trauma and mourning. -
The Razor's Edge
The Razor's Edge is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The book was first published in 1944. It tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. -
The Great Gatsby
Throughout the 1920s, commonly referred to as the “Roaring Twenties”, were the Women's Rights Movement, Prohibition, and The Great War, among other events. Fitzgerald grew up during this era, which he described in his novel The Great Gatsby as a time when much sinfulness and immorality was occurring. -
Of Mice and Men
On this day, John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, the story of the bond between two migrant workers, is published. He adapted the book into a three-act play, which was produced the same year. The story brought national attention to Steinbeck’s work, which had started to catch on in 1935 with the publication of his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat. -
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901[1] – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue". -
Louis Armstrong
Armstrong became one of the most innovative and influential musicians of the 20th century, and one of the most beloved entertainers in the world. Born Louis Daniel Armstrong in 1901 he was raised by his mother in the urban slums of New Orleans. As a youth, he was locked up for delinquency at the Colored Waifs' home in New Orleans, where he was given a cornet to play in the home's brass band. In 1922 Armstrong joined “Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band”. -
Paul Robeson
Born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson went on to become a stellar athlete and performing artist. He starred in both stage and film versions of The Emperor Jones and Show Boat, and established an immensely popular screen and singing career of international proportions. Robeson spoke out against racism and became a world activist, yet was blacklisted during the paranoia of McCarthyism in the 1950s. He died in Pennsylvania in 1976. -
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald, naturalised French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, activist, French Resistance agent and freemason[2]. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. During her early career she was renowned as a dancer, and was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. -
Zora Neale Hurston
Born in Alabama in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston became a fixture of New York City's Harlem Renaissance, thanks to novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God and shorter works like "Sweat." She was also an outstanding folklorist and anthropologist who recorded cultural history, as illustrated by her Mules and Men. Hurston died in poverty in 1960, before a revival of interest led to posthumous recognition of her accomplishments. -
Non Belivers
Didn't believe we came from dust. -
Origin of Prohibition
In the 1820s and ’30s, a wave of religious revivalism swept the United States, leading to increased calls for temperance, as well as other “perfectionist” movements such as the abolition of slavery. In 1838, the state of Massachusetts passed a temperance law banning the sale of spirits in less than 15-gallon quantities; though the law was repealed two years later, it set a precedent for such legislation. -
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover in The 1920s. Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) was a self-made millionaire in the mining industry, a very successful Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928, and a very unsuccessful president of the U.S. from 1929 to 1933. -
Herbert Hoover 2
Herbert Hoover in The 1920s. Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) was a self-made millionaire in the mining industry, a very successful Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928, and a very unsuccessful president of the U.S. from 1929 to 1933. -
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living -
German Politics
The democratic German republic, known as the Weimar Republic (1919-33), was affected by hyperinflation and other serious economic problems. Nationalist elements under a variety of movements, including the Nazi Party led by the Austrian Adolf Hitler, blamed Germany's "humiliating" status on the harshness of the post-war settlement, on faults of democracy, on Social Democrats and Communists, and on the Jews, whom it claimed possessed a financial stranglehold on Germany. -
Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. It was Waugh's first published novel; an earlier attempt, titled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and Fall is based, in part, on Waugh's schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales. -
Immigration Act of 1924
Established a strict quota system limiting immigration for each nationality to two percent of the total number of people of that nationality recorded in the 1890 U.S. Census (but excluding immigrants from Asia). The act replaced a previous, more generous quota system that admitted three percent of each nationality’s population in the 1910 census. The 1924 act’s quota was based on the national origins of the full U.S. population. -
Stock Market Crashes
Stock market crash of 1929, also called the Great Crash, a sharp decline in U.S. stock market values in 1929 that contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s. ... During the mid- to late 1920s, the stock market in the United States underwent rapid expansion. -
Stock Market Crashes 2
Stock market crash of 1929, also called the Great Crash, a sharp decline in U.S. stock market values in 1929 that contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s. ... During the mid- to late 1920s, the stock market in the United States underwent rapid expansion.
