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

Collected commentary on modern youth, 1920-1931
From "Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s" primary source collection. “Is the Younger Generation in Peril?” “Has Youth Deteriorated? “How Wild Is Wild Youth?” Are they worse than any previous generation? Are they irretrievably corrupted by modernity? The anxiety that dominated headlines in the Twenties was met with equally fervent defenses of the postwar generation.

The New Woman of the 1920s: Debating Bobbed-Hair
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.
Women Working, 1800-1930
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.

The Great Gatsby

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Call Number: FITZ
ISBN: 9780857980946
Jay Gatsby is a self-made man famed for his decadent, champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island's bright and beautiful, he longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion.

The Great Gatsby - an alternate interpretation
Article title: Gatsby’s Secret
Read as the story of a passing Black man, "The Great Gatsby" is the great American novel.
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“...of all of the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a May 1925 letter to literary critic Edmund Wilson
100 years later, 'The Great Gatsby' still speaks to the troubled dream of America
From National Public Radio America
Published: April 8, 20252:43 PM ET
How 'Gatsby' Went From A Moldering Flop To A Great American Novel
From National Public Radio America.
Published September 8, 20141:25 PM ET
The Great Gatsby at 100: the Jazz Age novel that helps explain Trump’s America
Fuelled by the infectious rhythms of jazz, driven by the economic forces of market prosperity and mass consumerism, and heady on the alcoholic vapours and illicit thrills associated with Prohibition-era nightlife, the 1920s were a decade where American fortunes were made and lost.
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Fitzgerald would have had rich material to work with, had he been alive today. Ours, lest we forget, is a world where ersatz robber barons hoard nearly all our shared available assets and resources, where racist discourse resounds, and where rampant consumerism remains unchecked.

The Jazz Age

The Jazz Age
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.
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The Jazz Age glorified city life. Americans — including many African American sharecroppers from the South — were leaving their farms in record numbers to live and work in places like Chicago and New York City. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it a time when "the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser."
How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood
Young women with short hairstyles, cigarettes dangling from their painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band, explored new-found freedoms.
Flappers:"The new woman"
How Gay Culture Blossomed During the Roaring Twenties
During Prohibition, gay nightlife and culture reached new heights—at least temporarily.

In the 1920s, radio and cinema contributed to the development of a national media culture in the United States. For many middle-class Americans, the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity. Rising earnings generated more disposable income for the consumption of entertainment and leisure. This new wealth coincided with and fueled technological innovations, resulting in the booming popularity of entertainment like movies, sports, and radio programs.

Movies, radio, and sports in the 1920s
From the Khan Academy.
Includes:
* Leisure & consumption in the 1920s
* Cinema in the 1920s
* The power of radio and the world of sports
The rise of talkies
Sound in film likely saved the industry during the Great Depression. Throughout the ‘20s, film attendance declined. After the introduction of sound, weekly movie attendance rose from 57 million in 1927 to 95 million in 1929. Technology rapidly developed around sound films to allow filmmakers more freedom. Cameras became quieter, microphones improved, and by 1930, most studios switched to sound-on-film technology which allowed editing. A new era of storytelling began.
How talkies changed the film industry
Since the invention of cameras and the creation of motion pictures, the entertainment industry has continued to innovate how art and technology are used to bring stories to the big screen. As Hollywood began to ramp up production in the 1920s, advancements to cameras, film editing, and sound became defining points in the evolution of cinema. One of the most influential developments that changed everything from how films were shot to how Background Actors were used, was the introduction of talkies.

Harlem Renaissance: Music, Literature, Political thought

Harlem Renaissance: Causes and effects
National Museum of African American History and Culture
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.
Harlem Renaissance
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.
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Inlcudes:
1 Great Migration
2 How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?
3 Langston Hughes
4 Zora Neale Hurston
5 Countee Cullen
6 Harlem Renaissance Musicians
7 Cotton Club
8 Paul Robeson
9 Josephine Baker
10 Aaron Douglas
11 Marcus Garvey
12 Harlem Renaissance Ends
13 Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?
National Gallery of Art: The Harlem Renaissance
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?

7 Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
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.
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These writers were part of the larger cultural movement centered in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and offered complex portraits of Black life in America.
1. Langston Hughes (1901-1967)
2. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
3. Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
4. Claude McKay (1889-1948)
5. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)
6. Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
7. Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
Poetry Foundation Collection: The Harlem Renaissance
An introduction tracing the groundbreaking work of African Americans in this pivotal cultural and artistic movement.
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"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

When we think about the Harlem Renaissance, the arts come immediately to mind. But new political theories were also blossoming during this time. We've talked about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, but today we'll get into some other thinkers with different ideas about civil rights, fair labor practices, and Black nationalism.

Harlem Is Everywhere: Episode 5, Art as Activism
The final episode of the podcast Harlem Is Everywhere explores the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Explores the lasting impact of the art and organizing that happened during the 1920s and ’30s and how it paved the way for the civil rights movement. We’ll highlight some key political events of the time and explore the work of artists such as Romare Bearden and Augusta Savage.