2.  By the early twentieth century, a flood of immigrants had produced a more heterogeneous U.S. population.

3.  Immigrants came from  China  Japan  Europe

4.  The term “melting pot” was coined to describe the emerging American society

5.  By the 1920s, the country had developed a growing middle class.  The splendor of the Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end in 1929 with the New York Stock Market Crash.

6.  The Great Depression followed this stock market crash.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the role of the U.S. government to try to bring the country out of the Depression.

7.  Roosevelt’s New Deal started programs that:  Increased regulation of banks and the stock market  Created jobs  Established entitlements such as social security

8.  Although initially hoping to remain neutral, the United States participated in both WWI and WWII.  The atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities signaled the beginning of the atomic age.

9.  Growing tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to the cold war.  The threat of global destruction gave rise to the description of the times as the “age of anxiety.”

10.  The beginnings of modern poetry: Some poets began to use literature as a vehicle for exploring how the psychological and emotional impact of rapid urbanization and technological advancement affected individuals.

11.  Edgar Lee Masters and Edward Arlington Robinson expose the discontent and isolation they felt lay in many people’s hearts.  Robert Frost created his response to the conditions of the modern age (he functioned as a Transcendentalist).

12.  The Harlem Renaisssance  The Great Migration: many African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North.  A large number of these migrants settled in the Harlem section of Manhattan.

13.  Harlem became the cultural center of African American life  Writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals moved to the area  This cultural flowering came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.

14.  Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and others considered themselves the founders of a new era in literature.  Looked inward  Expressed what it meant to be black in a white-dominated world

15.  As a literary movement, modernism was a direct response to the forces shaping the twentieth century  Increased commercialism  Concentrated masses of people in cities  A rising middle class  The proliferation of pop culture

16.  Most modernists saw the such changes in society as a threat to the individual, especially the artist.  The term alienation —meaning a withdrawal from the values of one’s society—became a badge of superiority for the modernist.

17.  T.S. Eliot was a giant among modernist writers.  Much of his poetry deals with the spiritual and emotional emptiness that he believed characterized modern society.

18.  Fiction writer Sherwood Anderson introduced innovations in the short story with his tightly drawn psychological portraits of characters trapped by their own fears and frustrations.

19.  Ernest Hemingway wrote short stories and novels in a distinctive prose style.  Shared characteristic alienation  Protagonists are primarily men shattered by war and adrift in Europe.