| Synopsis: |
This work offers an edited compilation of first-person accounts consisting of valuable primary source materials, presenting historians with a wealth of information with which to dissect the times and better understand the events that occurred between 1920 and 1929. This work should appeal to scholars interested in early twentieth-century United States history, as well as scholars in political and social sciences. This book offers primary sources needed to examine one of the most significant decades in American history, the 1920s represented a transitional time of social, economic, and cultural change. Wedged between World War I and the Great Depression, this crucial decade encompassed postwar disillusionment, religious fundamentalism, the Red Scare, normalcy, the worst presidential scandals prior to Watergate, coal and railroad strikes, the Charleston dance, radios, automobiles, airplanes, stock market frenzies, booming prosperity, heroes and gangsters, the Scopes Trial, disarmament conferences, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, Republican ascendancy, Prohibition, bootlegging, speakeasies, the flawed Kellogg-Briand Pact, Ku Klux Klan terror, Governor Alfred A.Smith, popular songs, flappers, a new morality, a lost generation, outstanding novelists and playwrights, changes in fashion clothing, Sacco and Vanzetti, McNary-Haugen, Hays Office, Silent Cal, Billy Mitchell, Teapot Dome, Senator Thomas J. Walsh, the Progressive party, Al Capone, sports figures, and "The Jazz Singer," among others. Here is a wide range of divergent, often controversial, view points. It is reflective of American society in the 1920s and the diversity which shaped the United States. |