Arts & Culture:
Jazz Age.
1920-29: The 1920s was also not only known as the roaring twenties but also the jazz age. During this period jazz music and dance became wildly popular and played in all the dance clubs. The main places that the jazz age occurred was in New Orleans, which was a mix of African and European music. It did, however, occur in other countries such as Britain, France, and England.
1920s-29: Around this time the movie industry really started to boom. They started to replace the silent movies with motion pictures that had sounds as well.
1927: The first talking film that was released in 1927 was The Jazz Singer.
Flappers.
1920-25: F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the greatest writers during this era. He wrote This Side of Paradise which made flappers become even more wildly popular. He then wrote the Great Gatsby in 1925 which according to Wikipedia, criticized the glamour and cruelty of an achievement-oriented society.
Science & Technology:
1920: The radio was invented in 1920 by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, which the radio was originally called “the Hertzian waves”.
1923: Insulin was created and won a nobel prize by the co-discoverers Frederick Banting and Charles Best. Before insulin was invented, diabetes was something that was feared because they didn’t have anything else to help with the blood sugar levels. Banting first discovered insulin in 1920 but it took a lot of trial and error and years of testing it out before they submitted it and won a Nobel Prize.
Social Changes:
August 18, 1920: The 19th amendment was passed, which gave the rights for women to not only vote, but to also be able to have their own life careers and get a job. This amendment has been in consideration for forty-one years until Congress submitted it and a year later was finally ratified.
January 17, 1920: During 1920-1933 there was a huge prohibition going on in the United States that banned anyone from importing, producing, and selling any alcohol, also known as the eighteenth amendment. There were 48 states at this time and only two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, did not sign the amendment.
KKK meeting in South Carolina 1951.
1920s: The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 and during the 1920s they really started to grow. According to pbs, “The Klan devised a strategy called the “decade,” in which every member of the Klan was responsible for recruiting ten people to vote for Klan candidates in elections.” The Ku Klux Klan, also known as the KKK, were a white supremest racist group. They do still exist even today but have very little funding.
