U.S. History 1 Roaring Twenties Part 2: Changing Society

Changing Society  Flappers = modern women of the 1920s who shattered accepted social beliefs by smoking, drinking alcohol, cutting hair short, and wearing makeup and tight-fitting clothes.  Women adopted new lifestyles and roles in society (moved into professional jobs, voted, ran for office)

Heroes in a Rapidly Changing Society  In the midst of a changing society, many people turned to heroes who seemed to have values of an earlier, simpler time  Babe Ruth – baseball  Charles Lindbergh – first to fly nonstop from NY to Paris

Amelia Earhart, Jack Dempsey, Four Horsemen, Gertrude Erderle

Mass Media  Mass Media = the use of print and broadcast methods to communicate information to large numbers of people  The rise of radio, movies, newspapers produced a truly “national culture”

Mass Media in the 1920s  Radio  By 1930, nearly 14 million American households own radios  Radio networks such as NBC reach nationwide audiences  People around the country hear the same music, news programs, and commercials  Movies  Hollywood, suburb of L.A., becomes the center of American film industry  Theaters sell 100 million tickets a week at a time when the U.S. population is less than 125 million  Film making becomes the 4 th largest business in the U.S.

Mass Media: Newspapers  Newspaper chains “chains” buy up smaller newspapers around the country  Number of newspapers sold each day increases by 141%  People share the same information and are influenced by the same ideas and fashions

Harlem Renaissance  Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement begun by African American musicians, artists, and writers in the African American section of New York City  Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes created powerful novels and poems about the African American experience

Jazz Age  Jazz = grew out of African American music of the South, especially ragtime and blues.  Fast, upbeat music people could dance to  Musicians played a free form using improvisation

Other Jazz Artists of the 1920s