2024 exams

• During the 1920'S America experienced an economic boom due to WW1. There was a new sense of freedom in America during this time many people lives improved and there were great developments in modern culture.
• The 1920's were a golden age for American Sport.
• This was the start of the celebrity sportsman.
• Babe Ruth of baseball's New York Yankees became a national hero after a setting a home run record.
• Radio broadcasts, newspapers and magazines helped bring major sport events to mass audiences.
• One of the biggest success stories of the 1920's was the movie industry.
• The movie industry was big business before the 1920's but during the decade audiences trebled to a high of 100 million people a week going to watch films in 1930.
• Until 1927, all movies were silent.
• The most famous actors of the silent area were Joan Crawford and Charlie Chaplin
• Jazz and Harlem Renaissance:

  The most popular music of the 1920's
• For the first time white people were exposed to black music and they loved it
• The new sound originated from black neighbourhood of Harlem, New York.
• provided great opportunity for black musicians such as:

  Louis Armstrong

  Bessie Smith

  Fats Waller
• Radio broadcasting began in the 1920's
• Between 1923 and 1930, 60 percent of American families purchased radios
• The roaring twenties brought about a revolution for women in the Western World.
• After the austere and hard-working years of the First World War, young women found a new independence, and decided it was time to let their hair down.
• Women changed their hair and their clothes.
• Coco Chanel revolutionized the fashion world in 1920's and caused outrage with her 'Little Black Dress' which rose daringly above the knee.
• Women now had the opportunity to have jobs and vote. However, the jobs were very stereotypical for women and they stopped working as soon as they were married.
• The KKK stood for the Ku Klux Klan.
• They were one of America's most racist terror groups.
• The KKK's main aim was to maintain white supremacy over black people and immigrants and keep them in their place.
• The KKK dressed in white sheets, white hoods and carrying American Flags.
• Their methods of violence and intimidation included whipping, branding with acid, kidnapping, castration.
• ’Jim Crow' Laws - A set of discriminatory laws passed in the South that enforced racial segregation
• To get around postwar laws giving black people rights and protections, Southern states passed 'Jim Crow' laws - local laws that enforced segregation
• They were based off the 'Slave Codes' that had restricted the freedoms of slaves
• Plessy v. Ferguson 1896
• This controversial Supreme Court case ruled that 'Jim Crow' laws were fair and legal on the grounds that they kept black and white people 'separate but equal'
• A major social feature of the 1920s was Prohibition. A law introduced in 1920 prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcohol, although it was not actually against the law to drink alcohol. The law was motivated by the temperance movement which began in the 19th century as a protest against the drunkenness which was common in the lawless frontier towns of America
• The purpose of the Volstead Act of 1919 was to implement the Eighteenth Amendment and to set punishments for breaking the new law
• As gangsters started selling alcohol, organised crime started.
• The people who sold alcohol were called Bootleggers, eg Al Capone.
• Rum-runners smuggled alcohol into the USA from Canada and Mexico.
• Moonshiners distilled their own alcohol at home.
• Illegal drinking bars called speakeasies opened and by 1925 there were over 10,000 of these in New York alone.
• There was more corruption as gangsters bribed police officers, judges and politicians to turn a blind eye to their illegal activities.
• The legal system could not cope and so the government tried to solve the problem by appointing a Prohibition Commissioner, John F Kramer, in 1921. Before long he established a cohort of 3,000 agents.
• In 1924 the Investigation Bureau (later called the FBI) was established under J Edgar Hoover. His men had tougher methods.