This album presents the original sounds of the Roaring Twenties, as played by the famous California Ramblers (along with several different vocalists) during 1925 to 1928. They were one of the consistently reliable dance bands of the ’20s, playing ‘hot’ music of a very high order, and what is more, playing it in strict tempo a good ten years before we understood the term in connection with ballroom dancing.
The 20th Century: The 1920s: A Decade of Contradictions [VHS]
June 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
This documentary, the third in a 10-volume series chronicling the entire 20th century, focuses on the famed Roaring Twenties, and shows how this amazing decade was a study in contrasts. Making good use of archival films and vintage photographs, the cultural conflicts that marked the decade are portrayed. The decade began with the banning of all alcohol in the U.S., a disastrous social experiment that led to the rise of bootleggers and widespread organized crime. And while the Ku Klux Klan rose to such prominence that thousands of hooded members paraded down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in 1924, the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African American art and writing, was taking place in New York City. America wanted to withdraw from international affairs following the cataclysm of World War I, and Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were rising to prominence overseas. Evocative use of archival material, such as a film in which a Treasury agent demonstrates popular smuggling techniques of bootleggers, make this an informative look at a decade that saw America rise mightily in prosperity only to have its hopes dashed in the stock market crash of 1929. –Robert J. McNamara
Rockford: 1920 and Beyond (IL) (Postcard History Series)
June 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Rockford’s economic boom of the early twentieth century continued into the Roaring Twenties, when Rockford’s newly-erected skyscrapers symbolized the city’s “sky’s the limit” ambitions. But the good times came to a crashing halt with the arrival of the Great Depression in October 1929. With its longstanding blue collar industrial roots, Rockford would enjoy renewed and even greater prosperity as it readily capitalized on the World War II war effort and the post-war economic boom years. With a collection of nearly 240 vintage postcards, Rockford: 1920 and Beyond captures this dynamic, ever-changing era as Rockford transformed into “Illinois’ Second City.” Inside, see now-familiar skyscrapers like the Rockford News Tower, Talcott Building, and Faust Hotel enliven Rockford’s downtown skyline. Take a nostalgic trip to the Blackhawk Park Zoo and the Central Park and Kiddieland amusement parks. Watch post-war “car culture” change the face of the city with its drive-ins, shopping centers, and expressways. Witness the World War II revival of Rockford’s storied Camp Grant. See the famed Wagon Wheel Resort in its high-flying, star-studded Hollywood heydays. Marvel at the destructive power of Rockford’s deadly “Cyclone of ’28.”
The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933
May 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Pre-eminent among historians of labor history.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the roaring twenties” looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression.
Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s.
“In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition.
From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven
The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s
April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
F. Scott Fitzgerald named it, Louis Armstrong launched it, Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson orchestrated it, and now Arnold Shaw chronicles this fabulous era in his marvelously engrossing book, appropriately called The Jazz Age. Enriching his account with lively anecdotes and inside stories, he describes the astonishing outpouring of significant musical innovations that emerged during the “Roaring Twenties”–including blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas, and musicals–and sets them against the background of the Prohibition world of the Flapper and the Gangster.
The Jazz Age offers an insider’s view into the significant developments and personalities of the jazz age, including the maturation and Americanization of the Broadway musical theater, the explosion of the arts celebrated in the Harlem Renaissance, the rise of the Classic Blues Singers, and the evolution of ragtime into stride piano. It also contains a bibliography, detailed discography, and listings of the songs of the twenties in Variety’s “Golden 100″ and of films featuring singers and songwriters of the era.
From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women 1920-1940 (Young
March 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Roaring Twenties are remembered as years of prosperity and frivolity that ended abruptly with the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for women there was continuity to these years, as their ability to effect change in political, cultural, and economic arenas began to gain strength. These “new women” listened to radio, starred in movies, and reigned as consumers. They could legally vote on the same basis as men everywhere in the U.S. They wore clothes that scandalized their grandparents but were far more comfortable than anything their mothers ever wore. In Eleanor Roosevelt, they found a model recognized internationally as a leading influence on American policy. But not all women shared equally in this emancipation. Black women, Jewish women, Native American women, poor women, immigrant women–they found many of the newly opened doors slammed shut for them. Even in the prosperous days of the flapper, some women faced a daily battle for survival. Meet educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, tennis champion Helen Wills, Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset, blues singers Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Olympic medalist Babe Didrikson, lawyers, psychologists, labor leaders, farmworkers, housewives, and the host of women who shaped these decades.
From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women 1920-1940 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States , Vol 
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922: This Side of
March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Four Books that Defined and Chronicled the Jazz Age! Here in one eBook is the quartet of books that catapulted F. Scott Fitzgerald to literary immortality. Meet the flappers, the indolent young men, the speakeasies, the gangsters, the illegal hooch, and the easy money that characterized the Roaring Twenties. From This Side of Paradise to Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Tales from the Jazz Age Fitzgerald will light the way on a very special insider’s tour of the Jazz Age. The age that made Fitzgerald and killed him.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922: This Side of Paradise / Flappers and Philosophers / The Beautiful and the Damned / Tales of the Jazz Age (Library of America)
The 1920s (America’s Decades)
March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The ‘roaring’ twenties were a time of optimism and economic prosperity following the end of World War I. Chapters discuss topics such as Prohibition, the stock market crash of 1929, and the emerging influence of radio.
Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris,
February 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The way a society deals with hair speaks volumes about its structures, its wealth, and its values. How is hair arranged? Is it left long or cut short? How often is it washed? Do men and women treat their hair differently and what does this tell us about gender?
This stimulating book contains articles written by the Paris hairstylist Emile Long between December 1910 and December 1920 for an English trade journal. Long’s purpose in writing was to keep English coiffeurs informed about the goings-on in the world of fashion and hairdressing in France, and especially in Paris. In doing so he has provided us with a personal cultural history of the world’s most fashionable city in a period that stretches from the end of the Belle Epoque, through the First World War, and into the opening year of the Roaring Twenties. His investigation of hairstyles and fashion inevitably leads him to a fascinating discussion of important historical issues: the ‘true’ nature of Woman; the genesis and democratization of fashion; and popular attitudes towards hygiene. With his engaging literary style Long invites us to think about consumer habits and technology, notions of fashion and cleanliness, and changing ideals of femininity and the social order.
Students and scholars of history, fashion and French society will enjoy these rich and revealing accounts of what hair means to identity and culture.
Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910-1920 (Dress, Body, Culture)
The 1920s Scrapbook
February 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The 1920′s were a fascinating era and this book captures the mood of this radical decade in over 1000 colour images.
Many of the images of the nineteen twenties we see in books and media are black and white where the vibrancy of this period is lost due to the absence of colour. The 1920′s Scrapbook helps to bring this period to life through the use of color images that capture the period beautifully.
If you want a pictorial overview of the 1920s, the period known as the roaring twenties, this is it!