1920s CultureAlicia YenAndrew DarleyAdam WaldronAudrey Kost

Roaring Twenties

•The name suggests a time of notorious fun, loud music, and wild enjoyment.

•A time of liberation and rebellion against traditional values.

•Pop culture during the 1920s was characterized by the flapper, automobiles, nightclubs, movies, and jazz.

•New technology became available. "Machine Age."

Radio

● The radio “knitted the nation together.”● It started as local stations, but as technology

improved, national stations became more and more popular.

● Stations broadcasted everything from news and music to politics and news.

●"Amos 'n' Andy" was a popular comedy program of the time.

QUICK REVIEW!

● How did the “Roaring Twenties” receive its nickname?

● What was the 1920s characterized by?

Movies

•Hollywood in Southern California quickly became the movie capital of the world.

•The earliest movies were not required to follow a code of censorship.

•Movies experienced one of the fastest growths in popularity of all time.

•Rich diversity from the old Country became lost.

The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, became the first "talkie" upon its release in 1927, and color films began to be produced around the same time.

Life at Home

•Cars, radios, and electrical products were produced more quickly and effectively.

•Americans were beginning to move from the countryside to the cities.

•Women took low-paying jobs as retail clerks and office typers.

Flapper Lifestyle

•Sexual allure as an effective method for selling everything.

•Old-timers were taken aback by the sudden erotic explosion.

•Women began to proclaim their freedom by fashioning themselves after the flappers.

•Flappers sported dresses with shortened hemlines, showed off their rolled stockings, "bobbed" their hair, and painted their cheeks and lips with rouge. Flappers smoked cigarettes and were daring enough to wear the new one-piece bathing suits.

QUICK REVIEW!

● How did the flappers come about?● What did the flappers stand for?● What was the fastest growing industry at the

time?

•Jazz music spread from New Orleans with the Great Migration of African Americans

•It was pioneered by Handy "Jelly Roll" Morton and Joseph "Joe" King Oliver, both blacks, but all-white bands

•Jazz captured the spirit of the time, and even today it is considered classical American music.

Harlem Renaissance

● Great Migration of African Americans in search of improved economic opportunities.

● A new sense of racial pride.● In NYC, about 100,000 African American

residents during the 1920s made Harlem one of the largest black communities in the world.

● A new spirit of of artistic, cultural, and social creativity soon flourished.

Whites flocked to the Cotton Club in Harlem and nighclubs on the south side of Chicago, such as the Savoy, to witness performances by Duke Ellington, Louis

Armstrong, Honore Dutrey, Baby Dodds, King Oliver, Lil Hardin, Bill Johnson, and Johnny Dodds.

Literature

● New generation displayed youthful energy, the ambition of exluded outsiders, and a resentment towards betrayed ideals.

● H.L. Mencken criticized marriage, patriotism, democracy, prohibition, and middle-class American society in American Mercury, his monthly magazine.

● F. Scott Fitgerald's This Side of Paradise became a kind of Bible for aspiring flappers and their bewildered pursuers.

Art & Architecture

● Images of American factories and skyscrapers came to be known as Precisionism.

● The art of this era embodied the relationships people felt existed between industry and religion and science and the machine.

● Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects of the era felt as if buildings should grow upwards from their sites

● The completion of the Empire State Building in 1930 marked the birth of the skyscraper.

● http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=684n8FO68LU

Assignment

● What interests you the most about the 1920s culture and why? Write a short paragraph detailing this.s