The Roaring '20s (Culture & Society)
This two-word term describes the historic 1920s flowering of African American art, literature, music, and intellectual life centered in a upper-Manhattan neighborhood.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
This explosive 1925 Tennessee court case put a high school biology teacher on trial for illegally teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
What is the Scopes Trial? (Accept the Scopes Monkey Trial)
October 29, 1929—the catastrophic day the U.S. stock market completely collapsed, wiping out billions of dollars and signaling the start of the Great Depression—is known by this dark nickname.
What is Black Tuesday?
This grim, two-word nickname was given to the squalid, makeshift shantytowns built by homeless Americans out of scrap wood and cardboard, mocking the President they blamed for their misery.
What are Hoovervilles?
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously promised Americans a "New Deal" built upon these "Three Rs" of economic recovery. (Must name all three).
What are Relief, Recovery, and Reform?
Driven by jazz music and a desire for independence, these iconic 1920s young women shocked traditionalists by wearing short skirts, cutting their hair into bobs, and smoking in public.
What are flappers?
Fueled by post-WWI nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment, this white supremacist hate group experienced a massive, multimillion-member rebirth in the 1920s, expanding outside the South.
What is the Ku Klux Klan?
This dangerous, widespread 1920s financial practice involved buying stocks with borrowed money (often paying just 10% down), assuming the stock price would always go up.
What is buying on margin?
Caused by severe drought, over-farming, and high winds, this devastating environmental disaster destroyed millions of acres of farmland across the Great Plains in the 1930s.
What is the Dust Bowl?
To bypass the biased newspaper industry, FDR used this new mass media technology to deliver comforting, informal "fireside chats" directly into American living rooms.
What is the radio
Because the 18th Amendment banned legal bars, thousands of these illegal, hidden drinking spots operated across the country, often requiring a password to enter.
What are speakeasies?
This two-word term describes the intense national panic in 1919 and 1920 that communist radicals, anarchists, and Bolsheviks were actively plotting to overthrow the U.S. government.
What is the Red Scare?
Triggered by widespread panic, these terrifying events occurred when thousands of desperate depositors rushed to withdraw their money all at once, forcing thousands of institutions to permanently close.
What are bank runs?
While FDR believed the federal government should directly intervene to provide a safety net for citizens, Herbert Hoover championed this two-word philosophy, arguing that moral character and self-reliance meant individuals should succeed or fail without government handouts.
What is "rugged individualism"?
While the First New Deal focused heavily on immediate banking "relief" and industrial "recovery" to stop the economic bleeding, the Second New Deal shifted its primary focus to this third "R," aiming to permanently reshape the American safety net.
What is Reform?
This massive internal migration saw millions of African Americans leave the rural, segregated Jim Crow South for industrial jobs in northern and Midwestern cities.
What is the Great Migration?
During the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, this three-time presidential candidate and devout fundamentalist Christian served as the special prosecutor, famously taking the stand himself to defend a literal interpretation of the Bible. He was also known for making the famous cross of gold speech during the rise of the populist party.
Who is William Jennings Bryan?
This fundamental economic imbalance fueled the Depression: while Gilded Age mass-production technology allowed factories to churn out goods faster than ever, depressed wages meant average Americans suffered from this, causing consumer demand to plummet.
Overproduction or Underconsumption
Long before Wall Street crashed, this major sector of the U.S. economy was already trapped in its own deep depression due to plunging crop prices, heavy wartime debts, and massive overproduction.
What is the agricultural sector? (Accept farming)
Created in 1935, this massive New Deal program remains a cornerstone of American life today, providing retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to disabled Americans.
What is the Social Security Act?
Opposing the integrationist goals of the NAACP, this charismatic Jamaican political leader founded the UNIA and captured the imagination of millions of 1920s African Americans by championing Black nationalism and a "Back to Africa" movement.
Who is Marcus Garvey?
This notorious 1921 trial and execution of two Italian anarchists became a global symbol of American nativism, as many believed they were convicted more for their radical beliefs than actual evidence of murder.
Who are Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti?
Many economists argue that the Great Depression was severely worsened because this powerful government institution chose to restrict the money supply and raise interest rates in 1930 and 1931, instead of injecting liquidity into collapsing banks. In other words, they didn't do much though it was their job for such things.
What is the Federal Reserve?
This derogatory, four-letter term was used by Californians to mock the hundreds of thousands of desperate migrant farmers who packed up their trucks and fled the Dust Bowl.
What are Okies?
Literally the day after taking office, FDR used the WWI-era Trading with the Enemy Act to declare this four-day national event, halting all financial transactions to stop bank runs and save the American banking system from collapse.
What is a Bank Holiday? (Accept the National Bank Holiday)