U5L3 Roaring Twenties Culture

Question 1

What was a fad?

Answer 1

A fad is an activity or a fashion that is taken up with great passion for a short time.

Question 2

How long did fads typically last?

Answer 2

Fads caught on, then quickly disappeared.

Question 3

Name some popular fads.

Like really small ones

Answer 3

Flagpole sitting was one fad of the 1920s. Young people would perch on top of flagpoles for hours, or even days. Another fad was the dance marathon, where couples danced for hundreds of hours at a time to see who could last the longest. Crossword puzzles and mah-jongg, a Chinese game, were other popular fads of the 1920s.

Question 4

What were the most popular fads?

Answer 4

Dance crazes

Question 5

What was the most popular new dance?

Answer 5

The most popular new dance was probably the Charleston. First performed by African Americans in southern cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, the dance became a national craze after 1923. Moving to a quick beat, dancers pivoted their feet while kicking out first one leg, and then the other, backward and forward.

Question 6

How long did dance crazes last?

Answer 6

They came and went

Question 7

What were the flappers? How were they different?

Answer 7

These young women rebelled against traditional ways of thinking and acting. Flappers wore their hair bobbed, or cut short. They wore their dresses short, too—shorter than Americans had ever seen. Flappers shocked their parents by wearing bright red lipstick.

Question 8

How did older Americans view flappers?

Answer 8

To many older Americans, the way flappers behaved was even more shocking than the way they looked. Flappers smoked cigarettes in public, drank bootleg alcohol in speakeasies, and drove fast cars. “Is ‘the old-fashioned girl,’ with all that she stands for in sweetness, modesty, and innocence, in danger of becoming extinct?” wondered one magazine in 1921.

Question 9

How many females were flappers?

Answer 9

Only a few young women were flappers. Still, they set a style for others. Slowly, older women began to cut their hair and wear makeup and shorter skirts.

Question 10

What did many Americans think of the flappers?

Answer 10

For many Americans, the bold fashions pioneered by the flappers symbolized a new sense of freedom.

Question 11

What was another innovation in the 1920s?

Musical

Answer 11

Jazz

Question 12

What did jazz combine?

Answer 12

West African rhythms, African American work songs and spirituals, and European harmonies and band music. Jazz also had roots in the ragtime rhythms of composers such as Scott Joplin.

Question 13

What was Louis Armstrong’s contribution to the contribution of jazz?

Answer 13

Armstrong learned to play the trumpet in the New Orleans orphanage where he grew up. Armstrong had the ability to take a simple melody and experiment with the notes and the rhythm. This allowed his listeners to hear many different versions of the basic tune.

Question 14

Where did jazz mainly spread?

Answer 14

Jazz quickly spread from New Orleans to Chicago, Kansas City, and the mainly African American section of New York City known as Harlem. White musicians, such as trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, also began to adopt the new style. Before long, the popularity of jazz spread to Europe as well.

Question 15

What did many older Americans worry about?

Jazz and dance

Answer 15

Many older Americans worried that jazz and the new dances were a bad influence on the nation’s young people. Despite their complaints, jazz continued to grow more popular.

Question 16

What was American’s favorite sport?

Answer 16

Americans loved football, but baseball was their real passion. The most popular player of the 1920s was Babe Ruth. He became the star of the New York Yankees. Fans flocked to games to see “the Sultan of Swat” hit home runs. The 60 home runs he hit in one season set a record that lasted more than 30 years. His lifetime record of 714 home runs was not broken until 1974.

Question 17

What was the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight?

Answer 17

Charles A. Lindbergh
…
For more than 33 hours, Lindbergh piloted his tiny single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, over the stormy Atlantic. He carried no map, no parachute, and no radio. At last, he landed in Paris, France. The cheering crowd carried him across the airfield. “Lucky Lindy” returned to the United States as the hero of the decade.

Question 18

How did F. Scott Fitzgerald capture the mood of the 1920s?

Answer 18

He examined the lives of wealthy young people who attended endless parties but could not find happiness.

Question 19

How did many writers view Americans as they partied and gave no care to the WW1?

Answer 19

Many of them were horrified by their experiences in World War I. They criticized Americans for caring too much about money and fun. Some became so unhappy with life in the United States that they moved to Paris, France. There, they lived as expatriates, people who leave their own country to live in a foreign land.

Question 20

What did Emest Hemingway, a writer, do in WW1?

Answer 20

Still a teenager at the outbreak of World War I, he traveled to Europe to drive an ambulance on the Italian front.

Question 21

What did Hemingway write about?

Answer 21

Hemingway drew on his war experiences

Question 22

What was “A Farewell to Arms” by Hemingway about?

Answer 22

a novel about a young man’s growing disgust with war

Question 23

What was “The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway about?

Answer 23

he examines the lives of American expatriates in Europe

Question 24

What did F. Scott Fitzgerald write about?

Answer 24

The young writer who best captured the mood of the Roaring Twenties was Hemingway’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Question 25

What did Fitzgerald write about?

Answer 25

In The Great Gatsby and other novels, Fitzgerald examined the lives of wealthy young people who attended endless parties but could not find happiness. His characters included flappers, bootleggers, and moviemakers. Fitzgerald became a hero to college students and flappers, among others.

Question 26

What did Sinclair Lewis write about?

Answer 26

In novels such as Babbitt and Main Street, he presented small-town Americans as dull and narrowminded. Lewis’s attitude reflected that of many city dwellers toward rural Americans. In fact, the word babbitt became a popular nickname for a smug businessman uninterested in literature or the arts.

Question 27

How was the first American to win the Noble Prize for literature?

Answer 27

In 1930, Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Question 28

What was poet Edna St. Vincent Millay popular for?

Answer 28

She expressed the frantic pace of the 1920s in her verse, such as her short poem “First Fig.”

Question 29

What did Eugene O’Neill write about?

Answer 29

Another writer, Eugene O’Neill, revolutionized the American theater. Most earlier playwrights had presented romantic, unrealistic stories. O’Neill shocked audiences with powerful, realistic dramas based on his years at sea. In other plays, he used experimental methods to expose the inner thoughts of tortured young people.

Question 30

Who did Harlem house?

Answer 30

In the 1920s, large numbers of African American musicians, artists, and writers settled in Harlem, in New York City.

Question 31

What was the Harlem renaissance?

Answer 31

rebirth of African American culture

Question 32

What happened during the Harlem Renaissance?

Answer 32

During the Harlem Renaissance, young black writers celebrated their African and American heritages. They also protested prejudice and racism. For the first time, too, a large number of white Americans took notice of the achievements of African American artists and writers.

Question 33

What was poet Langston Hughes known for?

Answer 33

He published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” soon after graduating from high school. The poem connected the experiences of African Americans living along the Mississippi River with those of ancient Africans living along the Nile and Niger rivers. Like other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes encouraged African Americans to be proud of their heritage. In other poems, Hughes protested racism and acts of violence against African Americans. In addition to his poems, Hughes wrote plays, short stories, and essays about the African American experience.

Question 34

Describe other poets like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay.

Answer 34

Other poets such as Countee Cullen and Claude McKay also wrote of the experiences of African Americans. A graduate of New York University and Harvard, Cullen taught in a Harlem high school. In the 1920s, he won prizes for his books of poetry.
McKay came to the United States from Jamaica. In his poem “If We Must Die,” he condemned the lynchings and other mob violence that African Americans suffered after World War I. The poem concludes with the lines “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!”

Question 35

What did Zora Neale Hurston do?

Answer 35

Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in Florida, wrote novels, essays, and short stories. Hurston grew concerned that African American folklore “was disappearing without the world realizing it had ever been.” In 1928, she set out alone to travel through the South in a battered car. For two years, she collected the folk tales, songs, and prayers of African American southerners. She later published these in her book Mules and Men.

Question 36

What were the common threads of Langston Hughes’s work?

Answer 36

pride in African American heritage, elements of the African American experience in Mississippi and Africa, protests on racism and violence against African Americans