How Teachers can make the most of Prohibition | EDSITEment
Materials and lessons associated with the Ken Burns film.
13: Roaring Twenties
Lesson 2: NAACP's Anti-Lynching Campaign in the 1930s | EDSITEment
In this lesson students will participate in a role-play activity that has them become members of a newspaper or magazine editorial board preparing a retrospective report about the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s. As the students analyze and synthesize a variety of primary sources, they will gain a better understanding of the reasons for the failure of anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s, the limits of liberal reform during the New Deal, and the NAACP's decision to shift its focus to a legal campaign to end segregation.
Self Help in Hard Times
from Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"
The Jazz Age: The American 1920s: Digital History
The 1920s was a decade of major cultural conflicts as well as a period when many features of a modern consumer culture took root. In this chapter, you will learn about the clashes over alcohol, evolution, foreign immigration, and race, and also about the growth of cities, the rise of a consumer culture, and the revolution in morals and manners.
1930s: Digital History
This section examines why the seemingly boundless prosperity of the 1920s ended so suddenly and why the Depression lasted as long as it did. It assesses the Depression's human toll and the policies adopted to combat the crisis. It devotes particular attention to the Depression's impact on African Americans, the elderly, Mexican Americans, labor, and women. In addition to assessing the ideas that informed the New Deal policies, this chapter examines the New Deal's critics, and evaluate the New Deal's impact.
Videos: Spend An Hour In 1920s NYC: Gothamist
Surprising collection of videos taken in New York in the 1920s
Luigi Galleani, Palmer Raids: The bomb-throwing anarchists who terrorized Boston 100 years before the Tsarnaevs.
100 years before the Boston Marathon bombings, bombs went off at a police station and at the homes of political figures, with the goal of sowing fear and discord toward some vague political aims. This is one of those connections to the past that help us measure events today.
The Daily News's front-page photo of Ruth Snyder's execution (New York Daily News) | Newseum
For all of the focus on the Scopes trial, the trial of the 20s that garnered the most press may have been the "window sash murder" that later inspired the movie Double Indemnity. When Ruth Snyder was executed for her murder of her husband, the Daily News splayed her picture over the front page under the one word headline "Dead". Those who dismay over the lack of decorum in today's press have a short memory.
Palmer Raids Lesson Plan - Reading like an Historian
Although a little elementary, this lesson provides teachers with the guides to lead students through critical reading of short selections from Mitchel Palmer and Emma Goldman
The U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.
Although speakeasies and Al Capone may serve better to capture the imagination, students could explore the question of the governments role in their lives more deeply through the story fo the poisoning of alcohol by the US government
Cultural Themes of The 1920s
Outline from Tennessee Tech
Teaching the American 20s: Lesson Plans
Several history and english lesson plans that explore the 1920s. Lessons are described in detail and support material is included.
America in the 1920s, Primary Sources for Teachers, America in Class, National Humanities Center
"BECOMING MODERN presents an expansive collection of primary sources designed to enhance classroom study of the 1920s—a brief but defining period in American history, perhaps the first that seems immediately recognizable to us in the 21st century.
Organized in five themes, each with six to eight sections, BECOMING MODERN includes a multiplicity of genres to represent the broad expansion of media in the Twenties. Films, newsreels, animated cartoons, comic strips, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings are offered in addition to informational texts, fiction selections, visual art, photographs, and music selections. Nine collections of political cartoons and twenty-one collections of contemporary commentary provide unique overviews of the decade's most debated issues.
Headnotes and discussion questions guide study and analysis of the resources, reflecting Common Core Curriculum Standards for reading and writing. Individual texts are amply annotated to facilitate student understanding and inquiry."
Labor Strike, America in the 1920s, Primary Sources for Teachers, America in Class, National Humanities Center
Labor strike lesson from History Class
Fear Tactics - BackStory with the American History Guys
The segment "The Day Wall Street Exploded" includes and interview with historian Beverly Gage on America’s “First Age of Terror,” and Gage tells the story of an early anarchist attack on Wall Street.
The International Jew - by Henry Ford (Book)
Although Henry Ford's place in the US History taught in most high schools highlights the assembly line and the Model T, his anti-semitism is absent. How should teachers decide what to include and what not to include? This complete title of this book is "The International Jew - The World Foremost Problem"
The History of New York Scandals - Mae West’s ‘Sex’ Capade -- New York Magazine
Mae West wrote and starred in a Broadway show entitled "Sex" in the late 1920s. Despite the fact that more than a quarter-million people saw the show through its several-month run, she and most of the cast were arrested. Instead of fighting the charges of lewdness or pointing out that the audiences included, police, judges, and legislators, she decided to serve the time of 8 days at the Welfare Island prison and make the most of it for her career. In stories such as this, students can see the way in which the modern media culture was born in the 1920s. This also shows why a numbers of Americans were shocked by what was happening to their country
Elaine Massacre - Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Although we are eager to teach about the Little Rock Nine of 1957, the 1919 massacre of hundreds of African Americans in Elaine, Arkansas puts the Civil Rights movement in context. If teachers invest any energy in finding more about it and the debt peonage system of labor that prevailed in much of the south for decades after the Civil War, they'll think differently about teaching that the 13th Amendment itself ended slavery. It is also interesting how events like this don't make into the curricula canon of the "Roaring Twenties"
Beautiful Clara Bow in Black and White
Students may discount the technical ability of early photography and media of the 1920s - this photo collection of the "It" girl, Clara Bow show the quickly escalating quality of the media and celebrity industry of the 1920s
Why the 2010s Are Reminiscent of the 1920s - The Atlantic
Divisions, America in the 1920s, Primary Sources for Teachers, America in Class, National Humanities Center
The "Roaring or Boring" debate is a staple of US History courses - this primary document set can support and inform that debate. Better yet, teachers can share the documents with students outside of this presentation and see if students will come to that binary interpretation themselves.
Red Scare! The Palmer Raids and Civil Liberties - California Social History Project
Teacher's Guide and Historical Background provides a glossary, timeline, and then includes political cartoons and primary and secondary sources. Each source is followed by a well-written series of questions to guide students to discover the main idea and pertinent details.
Medicinal alcohol Prescription
Examples of prescriptions for alcohol written in the 1920s. Teachers can start a lesson with a quick showing of these to students - does this defeat the purpose of prohibition? Did this create an easy way to evade the law? What other questions can students generate when look at these?
Were Sacco and Vanzetti Innocent?
Here's a different approach - this thoroughly "readable" description of Sacco and Vanzetti gives students enough background to consider the question - what is it about Sacco and Vanzetti's trial and execution that motivates textbook and standardizes test publishers, to include them in their account of US History? Do they belong in a US History course - why?
A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
The International Jew - The World's Foremost Problem, by Henry Ford, 1920s (Book)
This book by Henry Ford is claimed by some to be an inspiration for Hitler's anti semitism. Teachers could find primary source quotes in here to infuse as an element in a lesson or simply use this existence of this book to illustrate the prevalence of anti-semitism.
The Cost of Prosperity: Mass Consumption and Mass Production in the 1920s
Students will examine mass production and mass consumption through primary sources in class to define them and get a sense of how the economic changes of the 1920s also affected life in the U.S. This is a primary source lesson in which students "do history"
One Data Point, One Drop by BackStory
This six-minute podcast excerpt focuses on the work of Walter Plecker, a Virginian physician who played a prominent role in the development of Virginia's "Racial Purity Act" of 1924. The historian Helen Rountree and Brian discuss the use of slave records from the 19th Century to enforce racial purity laws in 20th Century Virginia.
How a long-dead white supremacist still threatens the future of Virginia’s Indian tribes - The Washington Post
As much as the jazz music of Harlem and the celebrity of Babe Ruth are products of the 1920s, so is Eugenics and ethic purity. This Washington Post story explains how Virginia developed a racial classification system in the 1920s that had repercussions late into the century. Students engaged in one of the staple "Roaring or Boring" debate projects will find this good fodder for their argument. Teachers reading may revisit the "Roaring Twenties" label or at least highlight its dubious value
Only Yesterday--Frederick Lewis Allen (Book)
A treasure-trove for teachers looking for DBQ material and students arming themselves for the "roaring or boring" debate, this 1931 book provides an up-front and personal history of the 1920s. The Table of Contents shows the clear organization of the book which makes it easy for students to use. Take a quick look, choose a chapter and read a paragraph or two - you'll soon realize this can be used. Is this a primary or a secondary source