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Frances Willard
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (Women Suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer, leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. -
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was 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. -
Henry Ford
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. -
Social Darwinism
It was contributed to German militarism and the rise of Nazism (see National Socialism). During this same period, advances in anthropology also discredited social Darwinism. German American anthropologist Franz Boas and American anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict showed that human culture sets people apart from animals. By shifting the emphasis away from biology and onto culture, these anthropologists undermined social Darwinism's biological foundations. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. -
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American politician, diplomat, and activist. She was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States. -
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. -
Marcus Garvey
Most popular black nationalist leader of the early twentieth century, and the founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). By the 1920s, the charismatic Garvey's UNIA claimed more than 4 million members, and crowds of more than 25,000 people packed into Madison Square Garden to hear Garvey speak of racial redemption and repatriation to Africa -
Jazz Music
Some will say that Jazz was born in 1895, when Buddy Bolden started his first band. Others will say 1917, when Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded the first Jazz record, "Livery Stable Blues." -
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. -
Langston Hughes
During the 1920s, Hughes was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black cultural vitality that sprang up in the African-American enclave of Harlem, New York. One of Hughes' most famous poems, "Harlem (Dream Deferred)" is a powerful statement of burgeoning black intellectualism in an age of racial oppression. -
Charles A. Lindbergh
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to promote the development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. -
Federal Reserve System
The central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907. Over time, the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System have expanded, and its structure has evolved. Events such as the Great Depression in the 1930s were major factors leading to changes in the system -
The Great Migration
The relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970, had a huge impact on urban life in the United States. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War. -
1st Red Scare
A period during the early 20th-century history of the U.S. marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included those such as the Russian Revolution as well as the publicly stated goal of a worldwide communist revolution. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of communism and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of paranoia -
Prohibition
Prohibition is the act of prohibiting the manufacturing, storage in barrels or bottles, transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcohol including alcoholic beverages. -
Warren G. Harding's "Return to Normalcy"
It was a campaign promise that things would return to the way life was before World War I -
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1921 to 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was 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. -
Stock Market Crash "Black Tuesday"
Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression. -
The Great Depression
It began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s bank had failed. -
20th Amendment
Changes the date on which the terms of the President and Vice President (January 20) and Senators and Representatives (January 3) end and begin. -
Tennessee Valley Authority
People were given jobs building dams, improve navigation, and produce electricity in a seven state area drained by the Tennessee River -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
insure bank customers against the loss of up to $5000 their deposits if their bank should fail -
21st Amendment
Repeals the 18th Amendment and gives the States the power to prohibit or regulate the transportation or importation of alcohol for delivery or use. -
Securities & Exchhange Commission (SEC)
created to serve as a federal "watchdog" administrative agency to protect public and private investors from stock market fraud, deception, and insider manipulation on Wall Street -
The Dust Bowl
150,000-square-mile area, encompassing the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, has little rainfall, light soil, and high winds, a potentially destructive combination. When drought struck from 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” -
Social Security Administration
to help elderly Americans during the Great Depression, monthly payments were made to retired workers or their survivors -
"Relief, Recovery, Reform
- Relief - Immediate action taken to halt the economies deterioration.
- Recovery - "Pump - Priming" Temporary programs to restart the flow of consumer demand.
- Reform - Permanent programs to avoid another depression and insure citizens against economic disasters.
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The New Deal
The New Deal was a series of domestic programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938. (Relief, Reform, Recovery)
