The Roaring Twenties
aka The Jazz Age
MODERNISM: 1914-1939
Louis Armstrong
"Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it."
~Louis Armstrong
George Gershwin
"True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time." ~ George Gershwin (composer)
Bessie Smith
The Cotton Club
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series
Art of the Harlem Renaissance
PICTURED ART: Artist: Palmer Hayden; Title: Jeunesse, no date, watercolor on paper, 14 x 17 inches, collection of Dr. Meredith F. Sirmans, NY. This and works by many other artists the Harlem Renaissance were influenced by their enjoyment of jazz, an often improvisational musical form developed during the 1920s by African Americans and influenced by European harmonic structure and African rhythmic complexity. Jazz can be identified by its characteristic blues rhythms and distinctive speech intonations. Harlem has long been an important center for jazz. Palmer Hayden could have seen such dancing as this at the Savoy, which was Harlem's most famous jazz club.
ASSIGNMENT: Find a piece of art created during the Harlem Renaissance and analyze the ways in which it represents the time period. Make sure you include the image with your analysis.
Langston Hughes on the duty of the Negro artist...
John Green on Langston Hughes and The Harlem Renaissance...
Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s Primary Source Collection - Prejudice
Choose one of the editorial/opinion articles contained in the following document as your AoW and respond to it. (1st para = summation; 2nd = your thoughts/opinions on article) Upload to Classroom.
Document #1 ("The Ku Klux Klan")
10 Things Your Should Know About Prohibition
Al Capone on Prohibition...
William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, and the State of Tennessee on what should be taught in schools...
- 1925 It is unlawful “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” From State of Tennessee Public School Law, which was violated by John Scopes, a biology teacher at Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee.
- 1925 “Our purpose and our only purpose is to vindicate the right of parents to guard the religion of their children against efforts made in the name of science to undermine faith in supernatural religion.” William Jennings Bryan, Democrat presidential hopeful and former Secretary of State, speaking out in favor of the Tennessee law, before the beginning of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tenn.
- "I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair." John Scopes on his role in the trial.
1920s Humorist Robert Benchley on Salesmanship
- 1924 “We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car.” Mother of nine children
- 1924 “Trespassers will B persecuted 2 the full extent of 2 mongrel dogs which neve was over sochible to strangers and 1 doubl shot gun which ain’t loaded with sofa pillors.” Sign posted by farmer to chase off city tourists who rob from his land.
- 1929 “The extensive use of this new tool by the young has enormously extended their mobility and the range of alternatives before them; joining a crowd motoring over to a dance... twenty miles away may be a matter of a moment’s decision, with no one’s permission asked.” Robert and Helen Lynd, looking at how life has been changed by the auto, in Middletown (1929), their study of Muncie, Indiana