1. The Roaring Twenties

2. Economic Boom
Reasons: US the only industrial power, technology, industrial expansion, automobile industry booms- connected to other industries profits
Result: Manufacturing output rises 60%, income raises by 33%, more technological advances happen

3. Consumerism
Middle class Americans could afford to buy more leisure and luxury items
Electric refirgerators, washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners
Automobiles: allowed for more travel, vacations, escaping isolation
Advertising increases: newspapers, magazines and radio

4. The 1920’s woman
Pink Collar Jobs- low paying service jobs (secretaries, sales clerks, telephone operators
The Flapper- a more liberated lifestyle where women could drink, dance, smoke, wear make-up, wear more seductive clothes, more freedom of expression
Margaret Sanger and birth control- planned parenthood, sexual activity with purpose other than reproduction
Continued push for the ERA

5. Prohibition- This isn’t working
Began January of a “noble experiment”
Only 1500 agents to enforce the laws- just as easy to get illegal alcohol as legal alcohol
Speakeasies- illegal bars sprang up across the country
Al Capone and other organized crime took advantage and expanded to include prostitution, gambling, and other drugs

6. The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation: America’s youth that came out of World War I
Rejected Wilson’s idealism, viewed the war as a waste of time, getting back to business as usual
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms (1929)- anti war
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby (1925)- a critique on obsession with material success

7. Harlem Renaissance Flourishing of African American culture
Explosion of jazz music- Duke Ellington
Literature: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Thurston

8. Religious Fundamentalism
Evolution v. Creationism
Modernists v. Fundamentalists
Scopes Monkey Trial- Darrow v. William Jennings Bryan

9. Entertainment
The Radio- almost every family had one by the end of the 1920’s (NBC and CBS are born)
Dance Halls- dance craze swept the nation, 10% of men and women went dancing once a week, The Charleston becomes popular
Hollywood- sound comes to movies, The Jazz Singer (1927), 40 million people saw movies in 1922