VCE History: Area of Study 2: Social & Cultural Change: Popular culture

The “new woman” of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: “To Bob or Not to Bob?” The short, sculpted hair of the “bob” marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as “America’s Sweetheart”), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

From the Harvard Library, an exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Can refine search by subject, year, places, etc.

In 1925 the Jazz Age was in full swing. It was the year Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington made their first recordings.The Phantom of the Opera opened at movie theaters. The Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, D.C. People sat on flagpoles, danced the Charleston, read a new novel called The Great Gatsby. And a young man named John Scopes went on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law.

Young women with short hairstyles, cigarettes dangling from their painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band, explored new-found freedoms.

During Prohibition, gay nightlife and culture reached new heights—at least temporarily.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of intense creativity in music and the visual arts as well. Notable African American writers of the time included Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, each of whom explored the alienation and marginality of African Americans in their work. Many literary works of the period incorporated folk material and elements of the blues tradition. Outside of literature, artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglas and performers such as Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker made their mark as well. Although the vitality of the movement suffered during the Great Depression, the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance survived in the 1930s with the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps.

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

Includes:
1. How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?
2. How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues?
3. How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?

Alongside their counterparts in art, music, theater and dance, these seven writers (along with others) eloquently demolished racist stereotypes, expressing pride in their African heritage and creating a new understanding of Black life and identity in the United States. In addition, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance drew much-needed attention to the bitter legacy of slavery and racism, helping to lay the foundations for the later civil rights movement.

An introduction tracing the groundbreaking work of African Americans in this pivotal cultural and artistic movement.