Roaring 20S

10. In 1927, the day was May 20th, and an airmail pilot by the name of Charles A. Lindbergh urged his small plane, which was heavily loaded, off of the runway at Roosevelt Field in Long Island, NewYork. From the start the mission, this was to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight, seemed doomed. It was a stressful, thirty-three hours, in which he traveled 2610 miles and arrived on May 21st on theairfield in Paris. He had done what no other person had been able to do, bringing the entire world closer together.

11. Harlem Renaissance is the name given to the period from the end of World WarI and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry, fiction,drama, and essay. It is characterized by intense debate; it had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem districtof New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening. It encouraged the new appreciation of folk rootsand culture.


12. The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed“unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapperwardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of womenworked in white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the...