-
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism, the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak. -
The Great Migration
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South. -
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. -
Marcus Garvey
By the 1920s, the charismatic Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association claimed more than four 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. -
Warren G. Harding's "Return to Normalcy"
Return to normalcy, a return to the way of life before World War I, was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan for the election of 1920. -
Clarence Darrow
Darrow's closing argument was published in several editions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was reissued at the time of his death. -
Henry Ford
Henry Ford developed the assembly line and conveyor belt to speed up motor production. Ford's River Rouge plant in Detroit, Michigan became the largest factory in the world. Ford produced a standard model, the Model T Ford. A new Model T Ford cost less than $300 in the mid 1920s. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. During the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke -
Prohibition
Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. -
1st Red Scare
The First Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included those such as the Russian Revolution and anarchist bombings. -
Teapot Dome Scandal
The Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s shocked Americans by revealing an unprecedented level of greed and corruption within the federal government. The scandal involved ornery oil tycoons, poker-playing politicians, illegal liquor sales, a murder-suicide, a womanizing president and a bagful of bribery cash delivered on the sly. -
Jazz Music
If freedom was the mindset of the Roaring Twenties, then jazz was the soundtrack. The Jazz Age was a cultural period and movement that took place in America during the 1920s from which both new styles of music and dance emerged. -
20th Amendment
The Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution moved the beginning and ending of the terms of the president and vice president from March 4 to January 20, and of members of Congress from March 4 to January 3. -
William Jennings Bryan
In 1925, he joined the prosecution in the trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher charged with violating state law by teaching evolution. In a famous exchange, Clarence Darrow, defending Scopes, put Bryan on the witness stand and revealed his shallowness and ignorance of science and archaeology. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
July 10, 1925, the Scopes Monkey trial began in Dayton, Tennessee. High school teacher John Thomas Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee's law against teaching evolution instead of the divine creation of man. -
Charles A. Lindbergh
an American aviator, made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21, 1927. Other pilots had crossed the Atlantic before him. But Lindbergh was the first person to do it alone nonstop. -
The Securities and Exchange Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1934 to regulate the commerce in stocks, bonds, and other securities. After the October 29, 1929, stock market crash, reflections on its cause prompted calls for reform. Controls on the issuing and trading of securities were virtually nonexistent, allowing for any number of frauds and other schemes. -
The Great Depression
The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939, and was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. It began 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 employment as failing companies laid off workers. -
Stock Market Crash Black Tuesday
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, the Stock Market Crash of 1929, began on October 24, 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States. Acting as the most significant predicting indicator of the Great Depression. -
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. -
Dorothea Lange
Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange is best known for her work during the 1930's with Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration. -
The Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dry land farming methods -
The New Deal
Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt's administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
There is consensus amongst economic historians that protectionist policies, culminating in the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, worsened the Depression. Roosevelt already spoke against the act while campaigning for president during 1932. In 1934, the Reciprocal Tariff Act was drafted by Cordell Hull. -
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter on May 18, 1933, to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley. -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
An independent agency of the federal government, the FDIC was created in 1933 in response to the thousands of bank failures that occurred in the 1920s and early 1930s. Since the start of FDIC insurance on January 1, 1934, no depositor has lost a single cent of insured funds as a result of a failure. -
21st Amendment
The Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 16, 1919. The Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933. -
Eleanor Roosevelt
Also in 1933 after she became First Lady, a rose was discovered and named after Eleanor, with the name Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt -
Relief, Recovery, Reform
Relief, Recovery and Reform - required either immediate, temporary or permanent actions and reforms and were collectively known as FDR's New Deal. The many Relief, Recovery and Reform programs were initiated by a series of laws that were passed between 1933 and 1938. -
Social Security Administration
Many of the federal and state programs that provide income security to U.S. families have their roots in the Social Security Act (the Act) of 1935. This Act provided for unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, and means-tested welfare programs.
