Chapter 21 Section 3 • 1920’s Popular Culture
Dec 15, 2015
Chapter 21 Section 3
•1920’s Popular Culture
What is Pop Culture?
Schools and the Media
Enrollment increased from 1914 to 1926
•
•
• Prosperous times led to higher educational standards for industrial job
• Broad arrangement of courses: vocational training in industrial jobs & college prep
Problems teaching Non-English Speaking immigrants
• Taxes used to finance the schools increased
• School costs $2.7 billion a year
Expanding News Coverage
• Education spread literacy
• Growing mass media shaped a culture
Newspapers hook readers with by using sensational stories in tabloids
• Magazines summarized the week’s news
Radio Comes of Age
• Most powerful form of communication
• Wider world opened to America
America’s Leisure
• People had money and time for leisure activities
• Spent $4.5 billion on entertainment
• Crossword puzzles and playing games
What Kind of Games?
• Flagpole Sitting
• Dance Marathons
Sports
•
Lindbergh’s Flight
• first nonstop solo flight across Atlantic
• stood for the honesty & bravery
• Paved the way for others
Entertainment and the Arts
• Movies became national pastime • Escape through romance and
comedy• The Jazz Singer was first major
movie with sound • Steamboat Willie first animated
film with sound
• Playwrights and composers of music broke away form European melodramas
• Now, plays reflected upon modern isolationism, confusion, and family conflict
George Gershwin
created new sound when merged traditional elements with American Jazz and created a new sound that was American
• Painters appealed to Americans by Recording an America of realities and dreams
Edward Hopper (loneliness of American life)
• Georgia O’Keefe (grandeur of New York)
Writers
• Richest era of literary history • becoming more critical of
American lifestyles and morals• Many writers chose to live in
Europe • Writers who were in WWI
denounce war
• Sinclair Lewis – first American to win Nobel Prize in literature.
• Characters used to ridicule Americans for conformity and materialism.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – coined the phrase “Jazz Age”
• Writing revealed negative side of the period’s lavish lifestyles
• Edna St. Vincent Millay – wrote poems celebrating youthful freedom from traditional constraints
• Ernest Hemingway criticized the glorification of war & introduced a simplified style of writing
Summary:
• How did public schools change?–Think immigrants, enrollment,
courses, and financing• What were some of the heroes of
the 1920’s?–Writers, Sports, Movies, etc…
• How was the media or news spread?