Roaring Twenties & Modern America
This new technology helped create a “mass culture” by broadcasting news, sports, and entertainment into homes across the country.
radio
Fear of this political ideology, which took power in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, helped trigger the First Red Scare in the United States.
Communism
This white supremacist group reemerged in 1915 and targeted African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews with terror and intimidation.
Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
This movement saw millions of African Americans move from the rural South to Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York in search of better jobs and safety.
Great Migration
This was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history, lasting roughly from 1929 to 1939, with massive unemployment and bank failures.
Great Depression
Cheap cars like the Model T helped create suburbs, new jobs, tourism, and teen independence. This invention “reshaped the nation’s landscape.”
Automobiles / Cars
These 1919–1920 raids, named after the Attorney General who ordered them, arrested thousands of suspected radicals and immigrants, often without warrants.
Palmer Raids
This 1919 event in a Northern city began after a Black teenager drowned at a segregated beach, leading to days of rioting, 38 deaths, and hundreds injured.
Chicago Race Riot of 1919
This New York City neighborhood became the cultural center of a Black artistic and literary explosion in the 1920s.
Harlem
When stock buyers borrowed money to buy shares, paying only a small amount up front, they were doing this risky practice.
buying on margin
Women who challenged traditional roles with new fashions, behavior, and attitudes toward work and independence were known by this nickname.
Flappers
This 1924 law created a quota system that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and most of Asia.
Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act)
This 1921 tragedy in Oklahoma destroyed “Black Wall Street,” killing an estimated 100–300 people and burning a prosperous Black neighborhood to the ground.
Tulsa Race Massacre
This poet of the Harlem Renaissance wrote “I, Too,” expressing pride, protest, and hope with the repeated line “I, too, am America
Langston Hughes
This New Deal program hired young men to plant trees, build parks, and fight soil erosion, sending much of their paychecks home to their families.
CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps)
This movement in the 1920s banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol but led to speakeasies, bootlegging, and organized crime.
Prohibition
In the 1920s, many Americans supported this belief that “native-born” Americans were superior to immigrants and pushed for strict immigration limits.
nativism
This discriminatory housing practice used government-backed maps to deny loans and mortgages to Black neighborhoods labeled “high risk.
redlining
This writer and anthropologist wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and often highlighted the strength and independence of Black women in the South
Zora Neale Hurston
This New Deal program created pensions for retirees, disability support, and unemployment insurance and remains a permanent part of American life.
Social Security Act (SSA)
This 1920 constitutional amendment guaranteed women the right to vote and was later reinforced by state actions in places like the headline “Tennessee Ratifies Suffrage Amendment.”
19th Amendment
This earlier 1918 law allowed the deportation of suspected anarchists and radicals, marking one of the first attempts to police political beliefs rather than just crimes.
Immigration Act of 1918 (Anarchist Exclusion Act
Founded in 1909, this civil rights organization used court cases and legal strategies to challenge segregation, discrimination, and lynching in the United States.
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
This Black nationalist leader founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), promoted “Back to Africa,” and encouraged racial pride and economic independence.
Marcus Garvey
This agency insured bank deposits, helping restore public trust in the banking system after waves of bank failures.
FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)