The Emergence of New
Values in the 1920s
Women
• Women began to demonstrate new
independence & assertiveness
• Women began to drink & smoke in
public
• Began reading Sigmund Freud
• Adopted the look of the “flapper”
– Short dresses
– Short hair & lots of makeup
Tin Pan Alley
• 1910- NYC emerged as capital of
popular music publishing
• Tin Pan Alley: (section of NYC)
where song-writing & and musical
ideas mixed together
• Blues, jazz, & ragtime melded
together
Tin Pan Alley
• Vaudeville – most popular form of stage
entertainment
– Showed need for sheet music & Tin Pan Alley
publishing houses supplied them
Youth & the Lost Generation
• New group of writers, the Lost Generation, rejected desire
for material wealth
• Sinclair Lewis: wrote Main Street and Babbitt, which
ridiculed hypocrisy of American life
– 1st American author to be awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
• Ernest Hemingway: wrote A Farewell to Arms about WWI
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: wrote The Jazz Age and The Great
Gatsby about the 20s
The Great Migration
• 2 decades from 1910 to 1930 witnessed the
Great Migration: 2 million African-Americans
moving out of the South to the North
• In search of jobs to escape sharecropping &
racism
The Great Migration
• Still faced racism, housing
shortages, and crime
• But, found organizations such as
National Urban League and the
NAACP to help them
• Largest African-American city:
Harlem
– In Upper Manhattan of NYC
– Roughly 200,000 AfricanAmericans lived there in 20s
Harlem Renaissance
• 1920s referred to as Jazz Age
• General awakening of African-American
culture has become known as the Harlem
Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
• Included visual art, dance, & music
• They shared an unprecedented level of
optimism & pride
Harlem Renaissance
• Poets & writers expressed pride in their heritage
– Zora Neale Hurston
• One of the 1st successful female African-American authors
• Published her greatest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God
– Countee Cullen
• won more literary prizes than any other African-American during
the 20s
– Langston Hughes
• One of America’s best poets
• Expressed the determination to overcome racial prejudice
– Alain Locke
• Influential writer during Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
• Marcus Garvey:
– highly controversial political activist,
known for fancy uniforms. Emphasized
racial pride.
– formed Universal Negro Improvement
Association
– Goal was the total liberation of African
people around the world
– Organized the “Back-to-Africa”
movement, where African-Americans
would return to Africa (especially Liberia)
Popular New Heroes
• Charles Lindbergh
– 1st person to fly across Atlantic
Ocean in 1927
– Single engine plane, The Spirit of
St. Louis; landed 33 hours after
takeoff