Key Terms of the Harlem Renaissance & 1920s Events

Normalcy

1920s were called the age of normalcy by Harding; despite this it was an era of significant social change; promised a return to normalcy in an inaugural address

McNary-Haugen Bill

high tariffs against foreign agricultural food urged by champions of parity; government commitment to buy surplus crop and sell them abroad

Margaret Sanger

pioneer of the American birth control movement; believed that large families were a major cause of poverty

The Flapper

women who concluded that it was no longer necessary to maintain a rigid Victorian respectability; result largely of Freudian ideas

Lost Generation

referred to the young Americans emerging from WWI; generation of artists and intellectuals found the new society especially disturbing

Sinclair Lewis

first American to win a Nobel Prize in literature; wrote Mainstreet, Babbit, and Arrowsmith; lashed out at aspects of society

F. Scott Fitzgerald

ridiculed the American obsession with material success in the book Great Gatsby

Harlem Renaissance

post WWI; new generation of black artists and intellectuals created a flourishing African American culture

National Origins Act of 1924

banned immigration from east asia entirely; deeply angered the Japanese government

The Scopes Trial

1925 court case in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan debated the issue of teaching evolution in public schools

Calvin Coolidge

governor of MA in 1919; VP under Harding; dour and silent; honest beyond reproach

Teapot Dome Scandal

Harding transferred control of the oil reserves at Teapot Dome from the navy to the Department of Interior; Fall leased them out for loans of nearly half a million dollars