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Section II (National Study): USA 1919-1941
Quick questions on The Roaring Twenties: HSC Modern History USA society and culture
10short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is the consumer economy?Show answer
The 1920s American economy doubled in size, with real GDP rising around 42 per cent from 1921 to 1929. Real wages rose around 20 per cent between 1923 and 1929. Consumer credit ("buy now, pay later") expanded around eight-fold.
What is the new mass media?Show answer
The film industry concentrated in Hollywood. Around 800 films per year were produced by the end of the decade; weekly cinema attendance reached 95 million in 1929 in a population of 122 million. "The Jazz Singer" (6 October 1927) starring Al Jolson introduced talkies.
What is the "New Woman"?Show answer
The Nineteenth Amendment (18 August 1920) gave women the federal vote. The Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) funded maternal and child health. Around 25 per cent of women were in paid employment by 1929, mostly in clerical, retail, and teaching work.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?Show answer
The Great Migration brought around 1.5 million African Americans to northern cities between 1916 and 1930. New York's Harlem became the cultural capital. The "New Negro" anthology edited by Alain Locke (1925) gave the movement its name.
What is the nativist reaction?Show answer
The new Ku Klux Klan, refounded by William J. Simmons in 1915, expanded under Hiram Wesley Evans from 1922. Membership peaked at around 4 million by 1925. The new Klan opposed African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants; it was strong in Indiana (Grand Dragon D.C.
What is the Scopes Trial?Show answer
The fundamentalist movement, organised around the Niagara Bible Conference (1878 onwards) and the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (1919), pushed state laws banning the teaching of evolution. Tennessee's Butler Act (March 1925) banned teaching that humans descended from lower animals.
What is historiography?Show answer
Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday, 1931) is the foundational journalistic account.
What is reducing the decade to flappers and jazz?Show answer
The Klan, Scopes, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the immigration acts are equal parts of the answer.
What is missing the urban-rural divide?Show answer
The transformation was largely urban; rural America was in agricultural depression for the whole decade.
What is treating Black Americans as outside the story?Show answer
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance are central; so is the violence of the Klan and the disenfranchisement of the South.