1920s: America Enters the Modern Age: Culture, Politics, Art, & Money

Most Americans think of the 1920s as "The Jazz Age," a time when flappers drank bathtub gin and danced the nights away at speakeasies. It was this and much more. It was a time when modern scientific and cultural ideas combined with the emergence of new ethnic groups to transform American arts and life. Most importantly, it was a time of cultural conflict. This primary source portfolio chronicles the vibrant era of the 1920s with historical primary source materials such as magazine and newspaper articles, government documents, advertisements, photos, maps and graphs, cartoons, posters and a portrait gallery. Sketches of colorful people who personify the era such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bessie Smith, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Charles Lindbergh and others enliven the broadsheets and documents. This portfolio includes a Study Guide with reproducible student activities. 5 Illustrated Broadsheet Essays: * The Prosperity Era * Modernism in Literature, Art and Thought * Life in the Twenties * Popular Culture * The Political Climate 15 Primary Source Documents: * Maps and graphs illustrating the suburbanization of Connecticut, 1920-1930 * Art Deco: the style of the 20s * Excerpt from Emily Post's Etiquette, 1922 * "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," by Langston Hughes, 1926 * The other America * Excerpt from Fred E. Burgess' Memoirs of Eighty Years of Farming * Selections from "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," by Hiram Wesley Evans, 1926 * "The Sacco and Vanzetti Cases," by Elizabeth Glendower Evans, 1921 * American Civil Liberties Union, "Report on Civil Liberty Situation for Week Ending Jan. 27, 1923" * Selections from "The Censorship in Boston," 1929 * "The War in Passaic," by Mary Heaton Vorse, 1926 * Map, U.S. Highway 101, Los Angeles, CA, 1926 * 1920s sports album * 1920s ad book compiled from various magazines, c. 1927 * Front page of Variety, Wednesday, October 30, 1929