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Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the genre of American popular music that rose in the late 19th century from the American song-publishing industry centered in New York City. The phrase tin pan referred to the sound of pianos furiously pounded by the so-called song pluggers, who demonstrated tunes to publishers. Tin Pan Alley comprised the commercial music of songwriters of ballads, dance music, and vaudeville, and its name eventually became synonymous with American popular music in general. -
Frances Willard
Frances Willard was a radical social progressive who stood out against gender inequality and fought to give a voice to society’s disenfranchised. Willard recognized, developed, and implemented the use of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as a political organizing force. Under her leadership, the Union increasingly saw its role as an organization advocating for broad social as well as political change. -
Federal Reserve System
The Federal Reserve System is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a series of financial panics led to the desire for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises. Over the years, events such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s have led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve System. -
The Great Migration
The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 mil African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many went North, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War. African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come. -
Jazz music
In the 1920s, music was referred to as a combination of nervousness, lawlessness, primitive and savage animalism and lasciviousness. Jazz was the music of the 1920s: loud and syncopated. This was the Jazz Age! The jazz recordings were often called "race records," and were sold and played only in the black neighborhoods of large cities like New York and Chicago. Controversial throughout its history, jazz was America's first contribution to the music world. And it all got started in the 1920s. -
!st Red Scare (1920s)
“Red Scare” refers to the fear of communism in the USA during the 1920’s. It is said that there were over 150,000 anarchists or communists in USA in 1920 alone and this represented only 0.1% of the overall population of the USA. However many Americans were scared of the communists especially as they had overthrown the royal family in Russia in 1917 and murdered them in the following year. In 1901, an anarchist had shot the American president (McKinley) dead. -
Warren G. Harding's "Return to Normalcy"
Warren G Harding was a Republican Senator from Ohio who delivered the "Return to Normalcy" speech to the Home Market Club of Boston on May 14, 1920. In it, Harding outlined his hope that the United States would, after a decade of progressive politics and foreign interventions, return to “normalcy.” In November, Harding received the highest percentage of the popular vote in a presidential election up to that time. -
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He published his first poem in 1921and attended Columbia University, but left after one year to travel. His poetry was later promoted by Vachel Lindsay, and Hughes published his first book in 1926. He went on to write countless works of poetry, prose and plays, as well as a popular column for the Chicago Defender. -
Teapot Dome Scandal
The Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s shocked Americans by revealing an unprecedented level of greed and corruption within a presidential administration. The scandal involved ornery oil tycoons, poker-playing politicians, illegal liquor sales, a murder-suicide, a womanizing president and a bagful of bribery cash delivered on the sly. In the end, the scandal would, by legal precedent, empower the Senate to conduct rigorous investigations into government corruption. -
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey became a leader in the black nationalist movement by applying the economic ideas of Pan-Africanists to the immense resources available in urban centers. During the 1920s, his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the largest secular organization in African-American history. Indicted for mail fraud by the U.S. Justice Department in 1923, he spent two years in prison before being deported to Jamaica, and later died in London. -
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was among the first attorneys to be called a "labor lawyer." In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial. The trial, which was deliberately staged to bring publicity to the issue at hand, pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a court case that tested Tennessee's Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925. -
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan became a Nebraska congressman in 1890. He starred at the 1896 Democratic convention with his Cross of Gold speech that favored free silver, but was defeated in his bid to become U.S. president by William McKinley. In 1925, he joined the prosecution in the trial of John Scopes. Clarence Darrow, put Bryan on the witness stand and revealed his shallowness and ignorance of science and archaeology. Bryan died soon after the trial ended. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
The Scopes Monkey Trial began in 1925 when a high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of teaching evolution in violation of a TN state law. The law made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible. Hearing of this attack on Christianity, William Jennings Bryan volunteered to testify. Then the great Clarence Darrow agreed to join the defense. This became one of the most famous trials in US history. -
Charles A. Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator who rose to fame by piloting his monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, on the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. After the kidnap and murder of his infant son, he moved to Europe in the 1930s and became involved with German aviation developments. Despite objecting to American involvement in World War II, Lindbergh eventually flew 50 combat missions. -
Stock Market Crash "Black Tuesday"
On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression (1929-39), the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak. Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest”. -
The Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl refers to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions. -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as governor of New York when he was elected as the nation’s 32nd president in 1932. Reelected by comfortable margins in 1936, 1940 and 1944, FDR led the United States from isolationism to victory over Nazi Germany and its allies in World War II. He spearheaded the successful wartime alliance between Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States and helped lay the groundwork for the post-war peace organization that would become the United Nations. -
Henry Ford
Henry Ford was was an American captain of industry and a business magnate, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. He built his first gasoline-powered horseless carriage in the shed behind his home. In 1932, Ford introduced the first V-8 engine, but the company had dropped to number three in sales in the automotive industry. Ford was also outspoken in the political realm. He drew controversy for his pacifist stance during years of WWI and gained criticism for his anti-Semitic views and writings. -
The Great Depression
The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939, and was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed. -
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt, (First lady) and the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a leader in her own right and involved in numerous humanitarian causes throughout her life. By the 1920s, Roosevelt, who raised five children, was involved in Democratic Party politics and numerous social reform organizations. In the White House, she was one of the most active first ladies in history, especially when her FDR was diagnosed with polio, and worked for political, racial and social justice. -
The New Deal
The Great Depression in the United States began on October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday,” when the American stock market crashed. When President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he tried to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. Over the next eight years, the government instituted a series of experimental projects and programs, known collectively as the New Deal, that aimed to restore some measure of dignity and prosperity to many Americans. -
Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC)
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression. Considered by many to be one of the most successful of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the CCC planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than 800 parks nationwide during its nine years of existence. The CCC helped to shape the modern national and state park systems we enjoy today. -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FCIC)
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is an agency created in 1933 during the Great Depression to protect bank depositors and ensure a level of trust in the American banking system. After the stock market crash of 1929, anxious people withdrew their money from banks in cash, causing a devastating wave of bank failures across the country.The Banking Act separated commercial and investment banking and for the first time extended federal oversight to all commercial banks. -
21st Amendment
In February 1933, Congress adopted a resolution proposing the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed both the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. The resolution required state conventions, rather than the state legislatures, to approve the amendment, effectively reducing the process to a one-state, one-vote referendum rather than a popular vote contest. That December, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the necessary majority for repeal. -
Prohibition & the 18th Amendment
By the late 1800s, prohibition movements had sprung up across the United States, driven by religious groups who considered alcohol a threat to the nation. The movement reached its apex in 1920 when Congress ratified the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. But it failed and led to a rise in organized crime. In 1933 widespread public disillusionment led Congress to ratify the 21st Amendment which repealed Prohibition. -
20th Amendement
The Twentieth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution addresses the terms of elected Federal officials, including the President, Vice-President, and members of Congress. Specifically, it defines the actual dates on which those terms begin and end. The 20th Amendment also provides for guidelines to be followed in the scenario that there is no President-elect. The Twentieth Amendment was ratified into the U.S. Constitution on January 23, 1933. -
Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)
The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1934 to regulate the commerce in stocks, bonds, and other securities. After the October 29, 1929, stock market crash, reflections on its cause prompted calls for reform. Controls on the issuing and trading of securities were virtually nonexistent, allowing for any number of frauds and other schemes. -
Social Security Administration(SSA)
The Social Security Act was an act established to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. By 1935 many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on seeking work, replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance. -
1936 Summer Olympics
For the first time in the history of the modern Olympic Games, people in the United States and Europe called for a boycott of the Olympics because of what would later become known as human rights abuses. Nazi Germany used the 1936 Olympic Games for propaganda purposes. The Nazis promoted an image of a new, strong, and united Germany while masking the regime’s targeting of Jews and Romas. Although the movement ultimately failed, it set an important precedent for future Olympic boycott campaigns. -
"Relief, Recovery, Reform"
The Relief, Recovery and Reform programs, known as the 'Three R's', were introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to address the problems of mass unemployment and the economic crisis. FDR's Relief, Recovery and Reform programs focused on emergency relief programs, regulating the banks and the stock market, providing debt relief, managing farms, initiating industrial recovery and introducing public works construction projects.
