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Blackface
A form of theatrical makeup used by performers to represent a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation" or the "dandified coon". -
William Jennings Bryan
An American orator and politician from Nebraska, and a dominant force in the populist wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as the Party's candidate for President of the United States (1896, 1900 and 1908). -
KKK
Throughout its notorious history, factions of the secret fraternal organization have used acts of terrorism—including murder, lynching, arson, rape, and bombing—to oppose the granting of civil rights to African Americans. -
Dubois
William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. -
Fundamentalism
A conservative movement in theology among nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christians. -
Henry Ford's Assembly Line
A manufacturing process (most of the time called a progressive assembly) in which parts (usually interchangeable parts) are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to work station where the parts are added in sequence until the final assembly is produced. -
Babe Ruth
An American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball spanned 22 seasons -
Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League
A black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the organization enjoyed its greatest strength in the 1920s, prior to Garvey's deportation from the United States of America, after which its prestige and influence declined. -
Red Scare of 1919-1920
Concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and its alleged spread in the American labor movement fueled the paranoia that defined the period. -
18th Amendment
Established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring illegal the production, transport and sale of alcohol (though not the consumption or private possession). -
Merchant Marine Act
A United States federal statute that provides for the promotion and maintenance of the American merchant marine. -
Speakeasies
These establishments were put in place when the sale and manufacturing of alcohol was illegal. -
Esch Cummins Transportation Act
A United States federal law that returned railroads to private operation after World War I, with much regulation. -
Teapot Dome Scandal
a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1921 to 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. -
The Emergency Quota Act
The Emergency Quota Act, also known as the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, the Per Centum Law, and the Johnson Quota Act restricted immigration into the United States. -
Bureau of the Budget
a part of the Department of the Treasury by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which was signed into law by president Warren G. Harding. -
Fordney-McCumber Tariff Law
a law that raised American tariffs on many imported goods in order to protect factories and farms. -
Unemployment Relief Act
Act of March 31, 1933 (Unemployment Relief Act), Public Law provided the relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work. -
Adkins vs Children’s Hospital
United States Supreme Court opinion holding that federal minimum wage legislation for women was an unconstitutional infringement of liberty of contract -
Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women. -
Dawes Plan of 1924
An attempt in 1924 to solve the World War I reparations problem, which had bedeviled international politics following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. -
The American Mercury
The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers. A second change in ownership a decade later turned the magazine into a virulently anti-Semitic publication. -
Immigration Act of 1924
It limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. -
An american Tragedy
A crime fiction novel by the American writer Theodore Dreiser. -
The Man Nobody Knows
The second book by the American author and advertising executive Bruce Fairchild Barton. In it, Barton presents Jesus as "[t]he Founder of Modern Business," in an effort to make the Christian story accessible to businessmen of the time.[1] -
The Weary Blues
first published in the Urban League magazine, Opportunity. It was awarded the magazine's prize for best poem of the year. -
The Great Gatsby
Nick, a would-be writer, moves in next-door to millionaire Jay Gatsby and across the bay from his cousin Daisy and her philandering husband, Tom. -
Scopes Trial
An American legal case in 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. -
St. Valentine Massacre
The 1929 murder of seven mob associates and a mechanic of the North Side Irish gang led by bugs moran during the Prohibition Era. -
The Sound and the Fury
It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th-century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. -
A Farewell to Arms
Set during the Italian campaign of World War, it is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. -
The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929
The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, under the administration of Herbert Hoover, established the Federal Farm Board from the Federal Farm Loan Board established by the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 with a revolving fund of half a billion dollars. -
Black Tuesday
Panicked sellers traded nearly 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange (four times the normal volume at the time), and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell -12%. Black Tuesday is often cited as the beginning of the Great Depression. -
Hooverville
A shantytown built by unemployed and destitute people during the Depression of the early 1930s. -
Moonshiners
By the 1890's the movement was gaining strength nationally, a fact that aided moonshiners tremendously. If a town outlawed the legal sale of liquor, the demand for moonshiners and their product became even greater. -
Hawley-Smoot Tariff
The Tariff Act of 1930 otherwise known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff or Hawley–Smoot Tariff, was an act sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley and signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. -
Emergency Banking Relief Act
An act passed by the United States Congress in 1933 in an attempt to stabilize the banking system. -
Beer and Wine Revenue Act
No fan of prohibition, President Roosevelt signed the Act in order to levy a federal tax on alcoholic beverages to raise federal revenue to get our nation out of the Great Depression. -
AAA
The American Automobile Association is a federation of motor clubs throughout North America. AAA is a non-profit member service organization; with 54 million members in the United States and Canada. -
FERA
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was the new name given by the Roosevelt Administration to the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) which President Herbert Hoover had created. -
TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority (T.V.A.) is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression. -
Federal Securities Act
The 1933 Act was the first major federal legislation to regulate the offer and sale of securities. Prior to the Act, regulation of securities was chiefly governed by state laws, commonly referred to as blue sky laws. -
Home owners Refinancing Act
An Act of Congress of the United States passed as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression to help those in danger of losing their homes. -
NRA
The National Rifle Association of America is an American social welfare organization which advocates for gun rights. -
Glass Steagall Banking Reform Act
The term Glass–Steagall Act usually refers to four provisions of the U.S. Banking Act of 1933 that limited commercial bank securities, activities, and affiliations within commercial banks and securities firms. -
CWA
The Civil Works Administration (CWA) was a short-lived U.S. job creation program established by the New Deal during the Great Depression to rapidly create manual labor jobs for millions of unemployed workers. The jobs were merely temporary, for the duration of the hard winter of 1933–34. -
National Housing Act
Federal legislation passed in 1934 to create the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Its purpose is to make credit more available to lenders for home repairs and construction and to make better housing available to low- and moderate-income families. -
Wagner Act
The Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is the most important piece of labor legislation enacted in U.S. history. -
Resettlement Administration
The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a New Deal U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government. -
Reorganization Act
An American Act of Congress which gave the President of the United States the authority to hire additional confidential staff and reorganize the executive branch (within certain limits) for two years subject to legislative veto. -
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962
