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- Flappers: The 'New Woman'
- Fashion, Fads and Film Stars
- The Jazz Age
- Prohibition Era
- Immigration and Racism in The 1920s
- Early Civil Rights Activism
- Sources
Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionab...
During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend—and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years late...
Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them “bedrooms on wheels.”) What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era. Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in N...
During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Actclosed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell...
Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti-Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Eu...
During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation. In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly ...
What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine. The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.
The Roaring Twenties were a period of rapid economic growth and social change. Read about flappers, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance and more.
