13: Roaring Twenties

13: Roaring Twenties

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Article Review 492- "From Isolationism to Neutrality: a New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919-1941" | H-Diplo | H-Net
Article Review 492- "From Isolationism to Neutrality: a New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919-1941" | H-Diplo | H-Net
"Isolationist" is the comprehensive and unchallenged characterization of American foreign policy in the 1920s and 30s in the taught narrative canon - historians think otherwise. The short article uncovers the pernicious side-effect of teaching the myth. although it does not intend to. Students are being taught that foreign policy is interventionist or isolationist - the world doesn't work that way
Blower proceeds in two steps. She first offers a sweeping criticism of the notion of isolationism and its opposite term internationalism (and of related binaries, such as anti-interventionism vs. interventionism, or unilateralism vs. multilateralism) as a way of making sense of American foreign policy disputes in the 1920s and 1930s. Americans, she concludes, had strong and complex views on foreign affairs; the key question they were engaging, often in a highly emotional (if not “shrill” and “hyperbolic”) manner, was not “will the United States play a role but what role will it play
·networks.h-net.org·
Article Review 492- "From Isolationism to Neutrality: a New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919-1941" | H-Diplo | H-Net
Oklahoma Will Require Schools to Teach 1921 Tulsa Massacre
Oklahoma Will Require Schools to Teach 1921 Tulsa Massacre
Great example of how history changes over time. For decades students went through their entire K-12 Social Studies classes in Oklahoma never hearing about the 1921 Massacre - now all of them will. The state of Oklahoma just answered the question - what do American have to understand about their past to make sense of their present?
·nymag.com·
Oklahoma Will Require Schools to Teach 1921 Tulsa Massacre
The Crisis - July 1922
The Crisis - July 1922
The Crisis was the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois and others and provides an insight into issues confronted by African Americans in the early 1920s. Teachers can have students just look through the magazine and share what they see, or search for more information on the advertisements. For example, the Bordentown School is advertised in this issue. Look also for Du Bois's comments about Abraham Lincoln in this issue
·marxists.org·
The Crisis - July 1922
The Seattle General Strike and the "Great Red Scare" | AHA
The Seattle General Strike and the "Great Red Scare" | AHA
This is a college professor's description of a lesson in which he uses primary source documents directly related to the Seattle General Strike of 1919 as well as articles from Mitchel Palmer and Jane Addams. This might provide a high school teacher with enough to come up with their own version of the lesson. But it also provides and example of a lesson that does not provide specific answers, it is more open-ended. In that way, it is more like the discipline of history rather than the teaching of history
·historians.org·
The Seattle General Strike and the "Great Red Scare" | AHA
Letter from Mrs. Hillyer concerning her husband's drinking activities.
Letter from Mrs. Hillyer concerning her husband's drinking activities.
Although teachers have a lot of materials on prohibition, maybe just one document can open everyone's eyes to an aspect of alcohol regulation that doesn't appear in the slidedeck. . In this letter, a wife is asking law enforcement to help her stop her husband spending money on whisky
·catalog.archives.gov·
Letter from Mrs. Hillyer concerning her husband's drinking activities.
On the Music of the Gross – Seventeen Moments in Soviet History
On the Music of the Gross – Seventeen Moments in Soviet History
This is just the sort of primary document never found in published educational resources but excellent for instruction. This Soviet view of Jazz Music (last third of article) is readable to high school students. This could play a role in World History or as well as US History of the 1920s
This is music for the fat men. In all the luxuriant cabarets of the “cultured” countries, fat men and women are lewdly wriggling their thighs to its rhythm, wallowing in obscenity, simulating the procreative act.
·soviethistory.msu.edu·
On the Music of the Gross – Seventeen Moments in Soviet History
Congressional Debates - Johnson Reed Immigration Act of 1924
Congressional Debates - Johnson Reed Immigration Act of 1924
Hundreds of pages make this source unusable in the classroom. "Ctrl-F" make it accessible - search "moron", search "crime" - pick any section and skim through the text until you find something that catches your attention. Much of the language in these debates of 1924 sound very familiar to 21st century readers
·govinfo.gov·
Congressional Debates - Johnson Reed Immigration Act of 1924
Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Urgent National Problems | The American Presidency Project
Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Urgent National Problems | The American Presidency Project
April of 1921, President Harding asks for federal anti-lynching law
Somewhat related to the foregoing human problems is the race question. Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy.
One proposal is the creation of a commission embracing representatives of both races, to study and report on the entire subject. The proposal has real merit. I am convinced that in mutual tolerance, understanding, charity, recognition of the interdependence of the races, and the maintenance of the rights of citizenship lies the road to righteous adjustment.
·presidency.ucsb.edu·
Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Urgent National Problems | The American Presidency Project
About this Collection | Warren G. Harding-Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
About this Collection | Warren G. Harding-Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
This correspondence (240 items; 1910-1924) consists primarily of letters written by President Harding (1865-1923), before and during his tenure as a U.S. senator, to his paramour Carrie Fulton Phillips (1873-1960), wife of a Marion, Ohio, store owner. Also included are drafts and notes for correspondence written by Phillips during her approximately fifteen-year relationship with Harding, as well as a handful of other related items.
This collection had been closed for fifty years as a result of court orders, settlement papers, and gift agreement. When the restriction expired on July 29, 2014, the Library digitized the originals and released the entire contents of the collection online
·loc.gov·
About this Collection | Warren G. Harding-Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence | Digital Collections | Library of Congress
Warren G. Harding: Family Life | Miller Center
Warren G. Harding: Family Life | Miller Center
Just a few short sentences in a presidential biography that would shock both teachers and students and prove the assertion that the past is not only stranger than you think, it is stranger than you can think. Note that Harding saw Nan Britton in the oval office
His affair with Carrie Phillips, wife of his longtime friend James Phillips, ran for more than fifteen years, beginning in Marion, Ohio in 1905. At one point, Phillips, a tall attractive woman ten years younger than Harding, had tried to blackmail him into voting against a declaration of war on Germany. As a German sympathizer who had lived in Berlin off and on, she had fallen under the surveillance of the U.S. Secret Service. In 1920, the Republican National Committee bribed Mr. and Mrs. Phillips with a free, slow trip to Japan, $20,000 in cash, and the promise of monthly payments to keep them quiet. She lived until 1960.
·millercenter.org·
Warren G. Harding: Family Life | Miller Center
Only Yesterday : Frederik Lewis Allen :
Only Yesterday : Frederik Lewis Allen :
This chapter is easily cut into different sections, each describing the effect of one force of social change on manners and morals in the 1920s. This material is well-suited to a reading lesson in which students in groups each take one section and dissect it, then jigsaw to meet with other students to compare and contrast the forces they read about
·archive.org·
Only Yesterday : Frederik Lewis Allen :
Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924 · Document Bank of Virginia
Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924 · Document Bank of Virginia
Telling students of the existence of this law is important, having them read excerpts of it tells much more about the thinking of some Americans in the 1920s
·edu.lva.virginia.gov·
Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924 · Document Bank of Virginia
1920 Census - Color or Race, Nativity, or Parentage
1920 Census - Color or Race, Nativity, or Parentage
This 87 page report on racial classifications published by the US Census provides considerable support for the conception of race as a social construct. Anyone having difficulty proving this to someone can show them the way in which the US Census discussed the way in which the count of people as "Negro" (in the language of the time) or "white" depended, to some extent, on the census worker - whether they were white or not
·www2.census.gov·
1920 Census - Color or Race, Nativity, or Parentage
Hiram Evans on the “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926) | The American Yawp Reader
Hiram Evans on the “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926) | The American Yawp Reader
<hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"> </hypothesis-highlight><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content">The races and stocks of men are as distinct as breeds of animals, </hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content">and every boy knows that if one tries to train a bulldog to herd sheep, he has in the end neither a good bulldog nor a good collie</hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content"><hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content">.</hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight></hypothesis-highlight>
The second word in the Klansman’s trilogy is “white.” <hypothesis-highlight class="hypothesis-highlight other-content">The white race must be supreme, not only in America but in the world.</hypothesis-highlight>
·americanyawp.com·
Hiram Evans on the “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926) | The American Yawp Reader
Annual report of the New England Watch and Ward Society : New England Watch and Ward Society : Internet Archive
Annual report of the New England Watch and Ward Society : New England Watch and Ward Society : Internet Archive
Plenty of material for the side that argues that the 1902s were more repressive and expansive, more boring than roaring. This can also be used for a "free-range" lesson in which students search words like"sex' to see how it is discussed
·archive.org·
Annual report of the New England Watch and Ward Society : New England Watch and Ward Society : Internet Archive