Introduces the major cultural and intellectual trends of the decade by introducing and assessing the development of the primary cultural forms: namely, Fiction, Poetry and Drama, Music and Performance, Film and Radio, and Visual Art and Design. A fifth chapter focuses on the unprecedented rise in the 1920s of Leisure and Consumption.

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen is a history textbook about the lively gloriousness of Roaring 20s America. Contents: "II. BACK TO NORMALCY III. THE BIG RED SCARE IV. AMERICA CONVALESCENT V. THE REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS VI. HARDING AND THE SCANDALS VII. COOLIDGE PROSPERITY VIII. THE BALLYHOO YEARS IX. THE REVOLT OF THE HIGHBROWS X. ALCOHOL AND AL CAPONE XI. HOME, SWEET FLORIDA."

During the 1920s, sound revolutionized the motion picture industry and cinema continued as one of the most significant and popular forms of mass entertainment in the world. Film studios were transformed into major corporations, hiring a host of craftsmen and technicians including cinematographers, editors, screenwriters, and set designers. The birth of the star system supported the meteoric rise and celebrity status of actors including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino while black performers (relegated to "race films") appeared infrequently in mainstream movies. The classic Hollywood film style was perfected and significant film genres were established: the melodrama, western, historical epic, and romantic comedy, along with slapstick, science fiction, and fantasy. In ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1920s examines the film industry's continued growth and prosperity while focusing on important themes of the era.

When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in the great depression. But the 1920s were much more. Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture. "The Modern Temper "brings these many developments into sharp focus.

In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as “modern,” which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went before—a new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity. The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectability and become tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance instead. Recognizing the gap between themselves and the mainstream public, younger critics alternated between expressions of disgust at American conformity and optimistic pronouncements of cultural reconstruction. The book tracks the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals who made culture the essential terrain of social and political action and who framed a new set of arguments and debates—over women’s roles, sex, mass culture, the national character, ethnic identity, race, democracy, religion, and values—that would define American public life for fifty years.

This penetrating analysis of one of the most extraordinary fads ever to strike America details how dance marathons manifested a potent from of drama. Between the two world wars they were a phenomenon in which working-class people engaged in emblematic struggles for survival. Battling to outlast other contestants, the dancers hoped to become notable. There was crippling exhaustion and anguish among the contenders, but ultimately it was the coupling of authentic pain with staged displays that made dance marathons a national craze. Within the well-controlled space of theatre they revealed actual life's unpredictability and inconsistencies, and, indeed, the frightful aspects of social Darwinism. In this grotesque theatrical setting we see also a horrifying metaphor - the ailing nation grappling with difficult times.

"In a class by itself. Goldberg provides an engaging, nicely written narrative and draws upon a variety of secondary and primary sources to create an outstanding historical synthesis." -- Ohio Historian