The Jazz Age
By: Conrad and Aaron
Fun Facts
- Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington made their first recordings.
- The Jazz Age glorified city life.
- The 20s in all its lighthearted excess grew from a great darkness. No one who survived what was then known as The Great War could imagine that anything like this cataclysm would happen again.
- The Phantom of the Opera opened at movie theaters.
- The Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, D.C. People sat on flagpoles, danced the Charleston, read a new novel called The Great Gatsby. And a young man named John Scopes went on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law.
- The excesses of the Jazz Age came tumbling down with the stock market crash of 1929.
- Americans -- including many African American sharecroppers from the South -- were leaving their farms in record numbers to live and work in places like Chicago and New York City.
- It was best to be young during the roaring 20s. Many people born in the 19th century felt threatened by a culture that seemed to have lost its moral compass.
- Allen argued that World War I shattered Americans' faith in reform and moral crusades, leading the younger generation to rebel against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of consumption and speculation.
- The popular image of the 1920s, as a decade of prosperity and riotous living and of bootleggers and gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the American psyche.
Citations
- "Digital History." Digital History. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Jan. 2016.
- PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 11 Jan. 2016.