The Booming 20's Study Guide

• Study notes for the Booming 20's

Terms to Know:

• Flappers were young women from the 1920s who defied traditional rules of conduct and dress.
• Values during this time were more consumerist, individualistic, and modern, characterized by a focus on personal success.
• Fundamentalism was a movement emphasizing strict adherence to basic religious principles.
• Evolution refers to the process by which different kinds of living organisms developed and diversified from earlier forms.
• A bootlegger is someone who sells illegal alcohol.
• A speakeasy was a place where alcoholic beverages were illegally sold and consumed in secret during Prohibition.
• Jazz is a fast-paced, improvisational style of music that originated in New Orleans.
• Transatlantic means anything crossing or relating to the Atlantic Ocean.
• Organized crime resulted from Prohibition and included bootlegging, gambling, racketeering, and violence.
• Prohibition is the forbidding by law of the manufacturer.

Names to Know:

• Zora Neale Hurston was a female African American author and filmmaker who produced works that explored the experiences of African Americans.
• Charlie Chaplin was an actor known for his silent film comedies.
• Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born political activist.
• Charles A. Lindbergh was the first person to make a transatlantic flight.
• Langston Hughes was an African American author and political activist famous for his jazz poetry.
• Amelia Earhart was the first woman to make a transatlantic flight.
• Louis Armstrong was a famous jazz and trumpet player.
• Bessie Smith was nicknamed "Empress of the Blues."
• George Gershwin was a leading composer for Broadway musicals and a rising star in the jazz world.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald was the author of "The Great Gatsby."

Questions to Know:

• New roles for women in the 1920s included working as airplane pilots, attending colleges, and holding positions as clerks, typists, operators, and elected officials.
• The effects of growing urbanization in the United States during the 1920s included better technology in farms, which created more people to move into the city.
• The 1920s revealed a national conflict over basic values, including the rise of the KKK and a boost in Christian fundamentalism.
• The positive effects of Prohibition was to protect individuals and families from the "scourge of drunkenness," but also led to more organized crime and smuggling.
• The Great Migration was the large-scale movement of approximately six million African Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North.
• African Americans in the post-WWI era faced widespread racial violence, including lynchings, intense poverty, Jim Crow laws, and economic slavery through sharecropping.
• Inventions that changed mass entertainment in the 1920s included the radio and the film projector.
• In "The Great Gatsby," Tom Buchanan references "The Rise of the Colored Empires" when going on a racist rant.
• Jay Gatsby grew up in a dirt poor farm in North Dakota.
• In "The Great Gatsby", Daisy Buchanan was driving the car that hit and killed Myrtle Wilson.