American History,
Popular Media, and
Modern Life
From boom to bust 1918-1932
Core reading: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zp9ftyc/revision/1
Key themes
I. American life from the post WWI period (the Roaring Twenties) to
the Great Depression
II. The birth of cinema and Hollywood and the impact on the people
and society
Media source: printed advertisements, The Great Gatsby (film) 2013
The Roaring Twenties
• New entertainment places
• The speakeasies (the illegal bars)
• The flappers (young women with short hair and short skirts)
• New music
• Jazz
• Ragtime
• Blues
• The roar of the factory
• The sounds of the electric dynamo, machines, factory assembly line 🡪 Henry Ford
introduced the assembly line as a new mass production method
• The growth of consumer goods including automobiles, refrigerators, radios, washing
machines, vacuum cleaners.
• Buying on credits became common 🡪 “Buy Now, Pay Later”
What’s the difference between two images?
Sears catalog 1907 Sears catalog 1920s
Expanding freedom
• Women got out of their corsets, Americans danced in new
ways to exciting new music, people created thousands of
inventions
• During WWI, women entered the workforce in large
numbers, receiving higher wages that many working
women were not inclined to give up during peacetime.
• In August 1920, women were given the right to vote.
• The classic image of a flapper is that of a stylish young party
girl. Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at
jazz clubs and practiced a sexual freedom that shocked the
Victorian morality of their parents.
Before and after
• “A flapper would wear the latest fashions,
know the latest dances, be fast living,
smoke (something only men had done
previously), and drink alcohol (in a time
when the United States had had it
outlawed during Prohibition)” (Nicholas
Hennell).
Speakeasies (speak+easy)
• The Prohibition 🡪 banned the
manufacture, transportation and
sale of intoxicating liquors
• In 1917, after the United States
entered WWI, President Woodrow
Wilson instituted a temporary
wartime prohibition in order to save
grain for producing food.
• Private, unlicensed barrooms,
nicknamed “speakeasies” became
popular places to find illegal alcohol
• in the late 1920s, there were 32,000
speakeasies in New York alone
The Jazz Age
• Jazz music exploded as popular entertainment in the 1920s and
brought African-American culture to the white middle class.
• Following World War I, large numbers of jazz musicians migrated
from New Orleans to major northern cities such as Chicago and
New York, leading to a wider dispersal of jazz as different styles
developed in different cities.
• Due to the racial prejudice prevalent at most radio stations, white
American jazz artists received much more air time than black jazz
artists
• Several famous female musicians emerged during the 1920s,
including Bessie Smith, who garnered attention not only
because she was a great singer, but also because she was a
black woman.
• The status of African Americans was elevated, due to the popularity
of this distinctly African American music. For the first time in
American history, what was previously considered "bottom culture"
rose to the top and became a highly desired commodity in society.
Phonograph was popular in 1920s
An Age of Excess
• Consumer consumption soared as more and more new products
became available to the average American: cigarette lighters,
refrigerators, electric stoves, vacuum cleaners, wristwatches,
automobiles.
• Easily-available credit. For the first time, Americans in the 1920s
became enamored with the stock market as a possible road to riches.
Class Activity: Consumer consumption
1. When was this ad published
and in which genre of print
media?
2. Who do you think is the target
of this ad?
3. What is the available payment
option of this product?
• While most urban families traditionally paid cash for what they
bought, the 1920s introduced the installment plan - "buy now, pay
later." By the late 1920s, credit purchases accounted for 15% of all
retail purchases. By 1927, two-thirds of all American automobiles
were sold on credit.
The Birth of US Cinema: Thomas Edison and
William K.L. Dickson
• Although Edison is often credited with the development
of early motion picture cameras and projectors, it was
Dickson, in November 1890, who devised a crude,
motor-powered camera that could photograph motion
pictures - called a Kinetograph
• It was the world's first motion-picture film
camera - heavy and static, and requiring
lots of light
• The world's first permanent movie theatre exclusively
designed for showing motion pictures was the Edisonia
Vitascope Hall, a 72 seat theatre which opened in
downtown Buffalo, New York on Monday, October 19,
1896
East and West Coast Film Studio Development: The
Move to Los Angeles / Hollywood
• Studios flee to Hollywood
• In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to
get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison's Motion
Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking
patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often
sued by Edison to stop their productions.
• The American movie industry was centred in Hollywood, Los Angeles in
California. The climate and location of Hollywood was ideal place for
outdoor filming and, by the 1920s, 85% of American movie production was
made in or around Hollywood.
• Five major Hollywood-area studios owned large, grand theaters where they
would show only movies produced by their studios and made with their
contracted actors. These studios were:
• Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and
Warner Bros.
1920s Hollywood
• The Golden Age of Hollywood -- The Golden Age of Hollywood is so
called because of the enormous amount of money the movies
produced and the images of the glittering and glamorous movie stars
that filled the movie screens.
• the establishment of Hollywood as the American home of movies,
• the establishment of the Studio System,
• the first color movie, the first talking movie,
• the Oscars
Variety of genres in cinema
• Silent Movies held no language barriers. The most popular stars of
the silent movie era were Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin and
"Fatty" Arbuckle.
• Musical Movies 🡪 In 1927 Warner Brothers released the 'The The
movie consisted mostly of music with only a couple of hundred
spoken words. Jazz Singer’ (also the first talking movie)
• Animated Movies 🡪 On November 18, 1928 Walt Disney's
Steamboat Willie premiered and introduced the world to animated
cartoon films with synchronized sound and to Mickey Mouse and his
girlfriend Minnie Mouse
The impact of cinematic development
• In 1927 an average of 60 million Americans went to the
cinema on a weekly basis. This increased to 110 million
by 1929.
• The Hays code
• The Hays Code was drawn up in 1930. In accordance
with this code, scenes of nudity and dancing of a
sexual nature were prohibited, a kiss could last for
no more than seven metres of film, adultery was not
to be portrayed in a good light, clergymen were not
to be ridiculed and films should condemn killing.
• The media of the 1920s helped to speed the assimilation
for the new Americans
• The development in the west coast
The Great Gatsby by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1925)
• Speakeasies flourished
when Prohibition failed
• The flapper was emerging.
• nouveau riche people
• The age of the automobile
