Reading Quiz (p.206-214) Terms Flashcards
The invention of the “horseless carriage”
Automobiles by the millions rolled off assembly lines in American factories in the 1920s. Henry Ford applied the assembly-line technique in producing his cars, and the Model T Ford became the favored means of transportation.
The electrification of the nation
Electricity grew at a tremendous pace, with nearly seventy percent of American homes receiving electric power. The increase in the demand for power resulted in the expansion of the industry, and it soon became the second most important economic activity in the country. Consequently, the production of home appliances, motorized machines, and electric turbines also expanded.
The motion picture camera
Invented by Thomas Edison in 1896, but not until the beginning of the twentieth century did the motion picture industry emerge as an art form, especially with the production of “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915. Motion picture theaters were opened in thousands of cities and towns, and by the 1930s the industry enjoyed an investment value of $2 billion and employed nearly 500,000 people.
Airplane industry
Started at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, when Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first successful flight aboard a heavier-than-air plane. Stimulated by WWI, the airplane industry took off, and aviation became an integral part of the nation’s army and navy. Soon airplanes carried mail, passengers, and cargo around the world. Journeys that had once taken days, weeks, or months to complete now took only hours.
Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight
On May 21, 1927, in a solo flight, Charles A. Lindbergh flew his monoplane The Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in thirty-three hours nonstop. The age of flight had truly arrived.
18th Amendment and Volstead Act
Amendment Introduced in 1917 and ratified in 1919. Prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. Volstead Act, passed over Wilson’s veto on January 16, 1920, was intended to implement the Eighteenth Amendment.
Prohibition and dismissal
Prohibition had become law, but many Americans had no intention of changing their drinking habits. To obtain liquor, they relied on bootleggers, or they made it themselves in their bathtubs. This acceptance of illegal activities corrupted the thinking of Americans throughout the country and encouraged a carefree disregard for the law.
George L. Cassiday
Congress’ own bootlegger. He operated out of the House Office Building on Independence Avenue.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nicholas Longworth. Said, “I don’t think that we foresaw in the slightest degree the great bootlegging industry that was to develop, the complete and organized violation of law and order.”
How did organized crime became rampant?
The Mafia, an offshoot of a Sicilian criminal organization, controlled not only bootlegging but gambling and prostitution in the major cities.
“Speakeasies”
Illicit liquor stores or nightclubs. In these dark, crowded places young women, called flappers, could be seen dancing the Charleston or listening to jazz and the blues.
Jazz
Began among black musicians in New Orleans but quickly spread north just before World War I. Fundamentally African in its rhythms and tradition, jazz drew from black ragtime, but also included French, Spanish, and English elements. In the 1920s it circled the globe and attracted the attention of serious composers. A number of popular musicians, such as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin, provided songs that became classics and were sung worldwide. These songs marked the beginning of an American musical tradition that was innovative and unique and extremely popular.
Flappers
Wore short dresses, cut their hair short, and smoked cigarettes. Having lost husbands, brothers, and boyfriends in the war, and parents in the influenza epidemic of 1919–1920, they exhibited a carefree wildness and independence that represented an entirely new version of the American woman. They had the vote and a sense of freedom that encouraged a boldness never expressed before.
American literature
The most important literary trend provided venturesome styles of writing in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson. They completed the full development of the naturalistic school of literature.
American drama
Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly created the American theater tradition.
American Poetry
Writers including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg added outstanding and uniquely American works of poetry.
Harlem Renaissance
Celebrated of black culture. Gifted writers Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, James W. Johnson, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay emphasized both the joy and the pain of being African-American.
Name a prominent painter and an influential architect
Painters like Georgia O’Keeffe produced works that had a definite American cast, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “prairie-style” architecture was so distinctive that it drew international attention.
