Roaring Economy and Consumer Culture
This revolution in manufacturing, famously used by Henry Ford, made products like cars cheaper and more available to average Americans.
What is the assembly line?
Short haircuts, shorter skirts, and more public independence defined this new type of woman in the 1920s.
What is a Flapper?
This new device became the center of home entertainment and helped create a shared national culture through news, music, and shows.
What is the radio?
The 18th Amendment launched this nationwide policy that banned the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages.
What is Prohibition?
This day in October 1929, when stock prices plunged and many investors panicked and sold, is often seen as the start of the stock market crash.
What is Black Tuesday?
“Buy now, pay later” became a common phrase in the 1920s thanks to this new purchasing method.
What is buying on credit or installment buying?
This 1925 trial in Tennessee symbolized the clash between modern science and traditional religious beliefs over teaching evolution.
What is the Scopes “Monkey” Trial?
This term describes the burst of creativity among Black writers, artists, and musicians centered in a New York neighborhood in the 1920s.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
Illegal bars that sold alcohol during Prohibition were known by this nickname.
What are Speakeasies?
During the 1920s, many people bought stocks with borrowed money, only paying a small percentage up front. What is this risky practice called?
What is buying on margin?
This type of advertising increased in popularity with the widespread access to automobiles
What are billboards?
Many Americans in rural areas supported these laws in the 1920s that sharply limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
What are immigration quotas or quota laws?
This type of American music, with roots in African American communities, became the soundtrack of the 1920s and was associated with nightclubs and speakeasies.
What is Jazz?
In the Scopes Trial, this group believed the Bible should be taken literally and opposed the teaching of evolution.
Who are the Fundamentalists?
Many Americans believed the stock market would just keep going up, so they kept investing without thinking about the risks. What is the term for this overconfidence in the market?
What is speculation (or speculative bubble/speculative mania)?
Advertising in the 1920s increasingly used this type of appeal, focusing on people’s desires, insecurities, and image rather than just listing product facts.
What is an appeal to emotions/psychology (or emotional/psychological advertising)?
This organization, which had existed after the Civil War, re-emerged in the 1920s and targeted African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews in the name of “100% Americanism.”
What is the Ku Klux Klan?
This new medium showed silent films and later “talkies,” spreading modern ideas and celebrity culture across the country.
What are movies or motion pictures?
During the Great Migration, many African Americans moved from this region of the U.S. to northern cities.
What is the South?
A period when asset prices, such as stocks, are rising significantly over a sustained length of time, often defined as a 20% or more increase from a recent low
What is a Bull Market?
Describe one connection between 1920s consumer culture (credit, advertising, mass production) and the severity of the Great Depression that followed.
Accumulation of Debt amongst many average Americans had impacts that reached well outside individual households.
Give one example of how the growth of cities in the 1920s contributed to the conflict between modern and traditional values.
Cities embraced diversity and new ideas, while rural areas held more traditional, religious values.
City life encouraged looser social norms (dating, dancing, flappers), which many rural Americans saw as immoral.
Cities became centers of modern culture, consumerism, and entertainment, creating fear of moral decline in rural communities.
This African American Author is one of the most famous writers of the 1920s and helped spread awareness of the experiences of African Americans at the time.
Who is Langston Hughes?
Two Italian immigrant anarchists were controversially executed in the 1920s after a robbery and murder trial. Their case reflected fears of radicals and immigrants. Name them.
Who are Sacco and Vanzetti?
Explain how the stock market crash hurt ordinary people who didn’t even own stocks. Give two different ways.
Banks that had invested in the market lost money and failed, wiping out people’s savings.
Businesses lost confidence and cut production or laid off workers, causing unemployment.
As people lost jobs and savings, they bought fewer goods, which hurt businesses even more.