Introduction The 1920s was a decade of deep cultural conflict. The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America. The conflicts of the 1920s were primarily cultural, pitting a developing more cosmopolitan, modernist, urban culture against the traditional more provincial, rural culture. Immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender politics, and sexual morality all became major cultural battlefields…

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Woodrow Wilson with his Fourteen Points wanted to be the architect of the post-war peace process. Wilson was a Southerner. He grew up in the South after the Civil War. He knew from his experiences what emotions were left over after a war. He realized that revenge on the part of the winner of the war resulted in strong negative…

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The romanticism of prewar days had disappeared in the shock of aerial bombardment and mustard gas. Necessity and opportunity had combined to free women from claustrophobic styles and ankle-length hair, even while their husbands, sons and lovers returned from the war wounded, bitter, and dazed to take up lives that no longer looked or felt the same. Machinery clanged, automobiles…

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The Twenties was the decade when modern society was established, when more things changed more rapidly than in all the years prior and since, and when urban culture had its beginnings. (Jennings, p. 102) The Twenties was characterized by a rejection of the code of the Victorian Age that held women to stringent standards of conduct, especially in the context…

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One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in This Side of Paradise, “…the seminal novel of the early 1920s” (Moore, p. 239), says “Here was a new generation…grownup to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” This describes the mindset of “The Lost Generation”, a term used to refer to the generation that came of age…

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During the 1920s, Harlem became the capital of black America, attracting black intellectuals and artists from across the country and the Caribbean. The Harlem Renaissance was the black version of the cultural rejection of the Lost Generation and the Algonquin Round Table. The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in…

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If one asked several people what image they had of the 1920s, an answer that might head the list of characteristics is something having to do with craziness, for the nonsense stunts and silly activities that seemed to dominate the social scenes of the Jazz Age. (Allen, Preface, p. 4) Several type of endurance contests were reflective of the craziness….

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Keeping with the tendency of the times to exaggerate most things, The Twenties featured numerous “causes celebres”, where events, fostered by sensationalist media, grabbed hold of the public attention and would not let go. Perhaps the most notable of these “causes celebres” was Charles A. Lindbergh. On May 27, 1927, 25 years old Charles Lindbergh began his attempt to be…

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The Scopes trial in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925 grabbed the attention of the entire nation. For days on end, people thronged to the town square where they set up tents, jammed the small country court house, read endless newspaper stories and listened to radio broadcasts about the trial of the century that pitted…

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