Unit 5 lesson 3 Roaring Twenties Culture

Question 1

What is 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

What were some fads of the 1920s?

Answer 2

• 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.
• Dance crazes came and went rapidly. 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 3

What were flappers?

Answer 3

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. Flappers smoked cigarettes in public, drank bootleg alcohol in speakeasies, and drove fast cars.

Question 4

How did the public feel about flappers?

Answer 4

To many older Americans, the way flappers behaved was even more shocking than the way they looked.

Question 5

How did flappers impact future generations?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

In the 1920’s jazz deveolped; describe where jazz came from?

Answer 6

Born in New Orleans, jazz combined 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 7

Who was Louis Armstrong?

Answer 7

Louis Armstrong was one of the brilliant young African American musicians who helped create jazz. 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.

Question 8

Name some other jazz musicians?

Answer 8

Other great early jazz musicians included “Jelly Roll” Morton and singer Bessie Smith.

Question 9

Where the jazz spread?

Answer 9

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 10

How did Americans feel about jazz?

Answer 10

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. Today, jazz is recognized as an original art form developed by African Americans. It is considered one of the most important cultural contributions of the United States.

Question 11

Sports legends in the 1920s

Answer 11

• Bobby Jones won almost every golf championship.
• Bill Tilden and Helen Wills ruled the tennis courts.
• Jack Dempsey reigned as world heavyweight boxing champion for seven years.
• At the age of 19, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

Question 12

Who was Charles A. Lindbergh?

Answer 12

On a gray morning in May 1927, he took off from an airport in New York to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean—alone. His was the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight.
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 13

How did the new generation of American writers come to be?

Answer 13

A new generation of American writers earned worldwide fame in the 1920s. 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 14

Who was Ernest Hermingway

Answer 14

Ernest Hemingway was one of the writers who lived for a time in Paris. Still a teenager at the outbreak of World War I, he traveled to Europe to drive an ambulance on the Italian front. Hemingway drew on his war experiences in A Farewell to Arms, a novel about a young man’s growing disgust with war. In The Sun Also Rises, he examines the lives of American expatriates in Europe.
Hemingway became one of the most popular writers of the 1920s. His simple but powerful style influenced many other writers.

Question 15

Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Answer 15

The young writer who best captured the mood of the Roaring Twenties was Hemingway’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. 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 16

Who was Sinclair Lewis?

Answer 16

Sinclair Lewis grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later moved to New York City. 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. In 1930, Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Question 17

Who was Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Answer 17

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was enormously popular. She expressed the frantic pace of the 1920s in her verse, such as her short poem “First Fig.”

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Fig,” 1920

Question 18

Who was Eugene O’Neill?

Answer 18

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 19

Where did a lot of skilled African Americans settle?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

What led to the Harlem renaissance?

Answer 20

This gathering of African American artists and musicians led to the Harlem Renaissance, a rebirth of African American culture.

Question 21

What happened durnig the Harlem Renaissance?

Answer 21

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 22

Langston Hughes was one of the best known Harelem Renaissance poets: tell me about him?

Answer 22

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 23

Other poets from the Harelem Renaissance such as Countee Cullen and Claude McKay also wrote of the experiences of African Americans. Tell me about them

Answer 23

• 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 24

Who was Zoe Neale Hurston?

Answer 24

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.