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The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s when jazz music and dance styles became popular worldwide. Learn about the origins, influences, and impact of jazz on American and global culture, as well as the role of Prohibition and speakeasies.
Learn about the 1920s America, an era of speakeasies, jazz, flappers, gangsters and Hollywood. Explore the social, economic and cultural changes that shaped the Jazz Age.
The Jazz Age was a decade of city life, music, dance, and rebellion against tradition. Learn how the Scopes trial, Prohibition, and the Great War shaped this era of American history.
- The 'New Woman' 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 what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations.
- Mass Communication and Consumerism. During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators.
- The Jazz Age. 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, the flea hop.
- Prohibition. 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.
Learn how jazz music and culture shaped American society in the 1920s. Explore the positive and negative consequences of the Roaring Twenties for race, gender, and politics.
Feb 1, 2023 · Learn about the Jazz Age, a period of cultural revolution and African American achievement in the 1920s. Discover the music, art, literature, and history of Harlem Renaissance and jazz clubs like the Cotton Club.
May 8, 2019 · How did F. Scott Fitzgerald embrace and critique jazz, the musical style associated with the 1920s, in his novel The Great Gatsby? Explore the history and complexity of jazz, from its African-American origins to its white appropriation, and Fitzgerald's role in defining the Jazz Age.