1. WWI EFFECTS ON THE 1920’S Brittney Morris Julia Sessa Anastacia Kastis

2. NEW TECHNOLOGY: One of the first major inventions to become a national craze was the automobile. First developed with a combustion engine in 1896 by inventor Henry Ford, he later started the Ford Motor Company, which mass produced affordable automobiles known as the Model-T. Ford's Model-Ts became such an overwhelming success that he sold over 15 million Model-Ts by 1927.

3. The earliest manual washing machines imitated the motion of the human hand on the washboard, by using a lever to move one curved surface over another and rubbing clothes between two ribbed surfaces. This type of washer was first patented in the United States in 1846 and survived as late as 1927 in the Montgomery Ward catalogue.

4. WOMEN SELF FREEDOM The most familiar symbol of this era is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike.” In addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations, even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

5. CELEBRATION! Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the flea hop. Jazz bands played at dance halls like the Savoy in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity,” and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired, but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

6. MASS MONEY: 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. In particular, they bought radios. But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, we created an economy of automobiles.

7. CITATIONS: http://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties