Mass Media &
Pop Culture
Pop Culture
This commercial invention allowed millions of families to simultaneously listen to news, sports, and presidential "fireside chats" from home.
What is the radio?
This musical genre, born from African American traditions in the South, became the defining sound of the 1920s.
What is jazz?
Ratified in 1919, the 18th Amendment instituted this nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors.
What is Prohibition?
This devastating economic collapse officially began following the catastrophic stock market crash of October 1929.
What is the Great Depression?
This term describes journalists who exposed corruption and social injustices during the Progressive Era.
What are muckrakers?
In 1927, The Jazz Singer became a milestone in cinema history by becoming the very first film to feature this breakthrough.
What is synchronized sound (or "talkies")?
This New York City neighborhood became the literal and symbolic epicenter of the 1920s African American cultural, artistic, and literary rebirth.
What is Harlem?
This specific nickname was given to young 1920s women who challenged traditional social norms by wearing shorter dresses, bobbing their hair, and listening to jazz.
What is a Flapper?
This ecological disaster of the 1930s was caused by severe droughts and poor agricultural practices, devastating farms throughout the Great Plains.
What is the Dust Bowl?
Her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, exposed the ruthless business practices of John D. Rockefeller.
Who was Ida Tarbell?
He revolutionized manufacturing and consumer culture by using the assembly line to build affordable automobiles like the Model T.
Who is Henry Ford?
He was one of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance, known for using jazz rhythms in his poetry to capture the Black working-class experience.
What is Langston Hughes?
The 1925 legal battle in Tennessee, known as the "Scopes Trial," put modern scientific theories regarding this concept directly against religious fundamentalism.
What is evolution?
This was the satirical, mocking nickname given to the crowded, makeshift shantytowns built by homeless Americans who blamed the President for their financial misery.
What are Hoovervilles?
This landmark 1906 novel by Upton Sinclair exposed sickening conditions in the meatpacking industry, leading to the Pure Food and Drug Act.
What is The Jungle?
This phrase describes the unified, uniform consumer lifestyle that spread across America as a direct result of coast-to-coast radio networks, national magazines, and Hollywood films.
What is mass culture?
This mass movement of millions of African Americans out of the rural South to Northern urban centers heavily accelerated the growth of the Harlem Renaissance.
What is the Great Migration?
These illegal, hidden drinking establishments multiplied across American cities during the Prohibition era, fueling organized crime.
What are speakeasies?
This 1930 federal tariff law was designed to protect American factories but backfired terribly by crippling international trade and worsening global depression.
What is the Hawley-Smoot Tariff?
Ratified in 1920, this amendment finally granted women the right to vote across the United States.
What is the 19th Amendment?
This specific term refers to the post-WWI generation of disillusioned American writers—including F. Scott Fitzgeraldand Ernest Hemingway—who criticized modern materialism.
What is the Lost Generation?
This prominent Jamaican-born political leader founded the UNIA and championed the "Back to Africa" movement, promoting Black nationalism and economic independence.
What is Marcus Garvey?
This anti-immigrant ideology spiked during the 1920s Red Scare, leading to severe federal quotas on immigration and the rise of a revived Ku Klux Klan.
What is nativism?
This specific group of World War I veterans marched on Washington D.C. in 1932 demanding the early payout of their military service certificates, only to be forcefully evicted by the U.S. Army.
What is the Bonus Army?
The mysterious explosion of this U.S. battleship in Havana Harbor helped spark the Spanish-American War.
What is USS Maine?