2026 SoSci III - Stats and Dates

In the [PART-DECADE], two married academics named Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merell Lynd assiduously searched for a “typical” American city that could serve as the focus for an ambitious sociological study.

early-1920s

The Lynds eventually settled on Muncie, a small city located in central Indiana [#] miles northeast of Indianapolis.

50

The Lynds published their groundbreaking research in [YEAR] as Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, applying the methodology of cultural anthropology to the daily lives of Muncie’s [#] residents.

1929; 40,000

Contemporary critics gave it rave reviews, and historians continue to mine the Lynds’s study for insights into the [DECADE].

1920s

Increased numbers of women in schools and the workforce as well as the greater freedom enjoyed by teenagers produced profound changes in the gender norms of the [DECADE].

1920s

Indiana had one of the lowest percentages of foreign-born residents in the nation in [YEAR], and Muncie attracted far fewer immigrants than larger, more industrial cities in the northwest corner of the state.

1920

At [#] percent, Muncie’s African American population was proportionately higher than that of huge metropolises like Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

5

At the time of the Lynds’s study, [#] of every [#] residents of Muncie belonged to the Klan, and the city had more Klansmen than Catholics.

1; 12

In [YEAR], [#] Klansmen marched through Muncie’s downtown in a show of force that was replicated in cities across the nation, including the nation’s capital in [MONTH, YEAR], when [YEAR] Klansmen proudly paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia.

1924; 2,000; Aug, 1925; 30,000

The revival of the KKK and its strength in areas outside the former Confederacy was part of a larger struggle to define American culture and citizenship in the [DECADE].

1920s

In [YEAR], D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a romanticized epic that glorified the original KKK asrighteous defenders of Southern white womanhood, debuted to widespread acclaim, winning praise from President Woodrow Wilson, who screened the film at the White House.

1915

Between [YEAR] and [YEAR], the Klan’s national membership mushroomed to an estimated [#] members, and it exerted significant political and commercial influence in states throughout the South, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest.

1920; 1925; 5 million

The Klan’s strength extended to fast-growing cities like Detroit and Chicago, where according to one estimate [#] percent of the eligible population had joined the KKK by [YEAR].

15; 1925

Indiana became a stronghold of the new Klan, where its [#] members made it the largest private organization in the state.

250,000

For most of the [DECADE], the Klan controlled Indiana’s Republican Party; the governor, [FRACTION] of the state’s general assembly, and both U.S. Senators owed their seats to the KKK.

1920s; 1/2

During the [YEAR] Democratic Convention, a resolution condemning the Klan failed to pass, deadlocking after contentious debate had exposed the party’s deep regional and ethnic divisions and nearly sparked a riot.

1924

While a series of scandals and internal conflicts within the KKK leadership led to the Klan’s decline in the [PART-DECADE], its dramatic rise in the first half of the decade signaled the potency of its multifaceted agenda.

late-1920s

The Klan trumpeted its patriotism behind the wartime slogan “[#] percent Americanism,” while also entering the decade’s culture wars as ardent backers of Prohibition (“drys”), moral crusaders against prostitution and government corruption, fundamentalist opponents of evolution, and vocal nativist supporters of immigration restriction.

100

Odious as the Klan’s explicit white supremacy was, it was by no means a fringe ideology in [DECADE] America.

1920s

Under American law, there are [#] main pathways to U.S. citizenship.

2

The [ORDINAL] Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, granted U.S. citizenship automatically to any person born in the United States.

14th

In [YEAR], the Supreme Court affirmed the citizenship of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents.

1898

Under Article [R#], Section [#] of the Constitution, naturalization remained the sole prerogative of Congress.

I; 8

Beginning in [YEAR], legislation had tied U.S. citizenship to race by specifying that eligibility for naturalization was open to “any free white person.”

1790

In [YEAR], a revised Naturalization Act extended naturalization to immigrants of African descent, while the [YEAR] Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens.

1870; 1882

[#] cases reached the Supreme Court in the [PART-DECADE] that forced the justices to clarify which peoples were eligible for naturalized citizenship and which were not.

2; early-1920s

The first case centered on Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man who had immigrated to the United States when he was [#] years old to attend the University of California.

19

In [MONTH, YEAR], in Ozawa v. United States, a unanimous court rejected Ozawa’s arguments.

Nov, 1922

Proof that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ozawa had not definitively settled questions concerning which individuals and groups qualified for naturalization came when another citizenship case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, worked its way to the top of the docket [#] months later in [MONTH, YEAR].

3; Feb, 1923

On the [YEAR] Census form, the federal government included “Hindu” as a racial category to refer to any person from the Indian subcontinent regardless of their faith.

1930

Thind argued that he was indisputably “Caucasian” and cited expert ethnographic and anthropological evidence that suggested that the Aryan race—a pseudo-scientific term popularized in the [PART-CENTURY] to refer to supposedly superior Northern Europeans—had originated in ancient India.

late-19th

The ruling affirmed the anti-Asian orientation of U.S. immigration and citizenship policies, which would endure into the [DECADE].

1960s

These Supreme Court decisions narrowed naturalization and fit within a larger movement to curtail the free flow of European immigrants into the United States that reached its climax in [YEAR].

1924

During the preceding [#] decades, America had experienced mass immigration on an unprecedented scale.

3

From [YEAR] to [YEAR], [#] immigrants arrived on American shores.

1901; 1920; 14.1 million

Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians substantially boosted America’s already substantial Irish Catholic population, so that by [YEAR] Roman Catholicism was the single largest Christian denomination in the country with [#] members.

1906; 14 million

During the same period ([YEAR]−[YEAR]), [#] Eastern European Jews, who hailed from cities and shtetls (the Yiddish word for town) within Tsarist Russia’s Pale of Settlement and various territories controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, immigrated to the United States.

1890; 1924; 2.5 million

Eastern European Jewish immigrants fled economic impoverishment, legal discrimination, and violent religious persecution and quickly outnumbered the existing population of American Jews who had emigrated from Germany in the [PART-CENTURY].

mid-19th

By [YEAR], more than [#] Jews called New York City home, the majority of whom lived in crowded tenements in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, making it the largest and most densely populated Jewish community in the world.

1920; 1 million

The [YEAR] lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, who had been falsely accused of murdering a young girl, represented the most overt and violent expression of anti-Jewish hate.

1915

In [YEAR], Ford issued an apology and a formal retraction of any articles in the Independent that had amplified “charges and insinuations” against the Jewish people and settled a libel case that had been brought against him for the antisemitic articles.

1927

Harvard President Abbot Lawrence Lowell’s stealth campaign to impose strict limits on the number Jewish students admitted to the university in the [DECADE], a policy that other Ivy League universities also adopted, showed a more insidious and genteel form of anti-Semitism.

1920s

Opposition to immigration had long been a fixture of American politics, but it scored significant victories with the passage of the Immigration Act of [YEAR], which imposed literacy tests and banned all immigration from Asia, and the Emergency Quota Act of [YEAR].

1917; 1921

The Emergency Quota Act capped the number of immigrants permitted each year by establishing a maximum quota equal to [#] percent of the number of foreign-born residents of a particular nationality as recorded in the [YEAR] census, the most recent complete set of data available.

3; 1910

In [YEAR], the Emergency Quota Act formula, which allocated [#] percent of the total quotas to countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, more than [#] immigrants entered the United States.

1924; 45; 700,000

Dissatisfied with the quantity and the perceived quality of immigration permitted under the [YEAR] statute, restrictionists led by Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania and Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington state, proposed a new system that would derive new national immigration quotas based on [#] percent of the foreign-born population in [YEAR].

1921; 2; 1890

Albert Johnson’s choice of [YEAR] was deliberate as that year’s census preceded the wave of mass immigration that followed for the next [#] decades.

1890

As a result, under the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of [YEAR], Southern and Eastern European countries received only [#] percent of the assigned quotas while the total number of immigrants admitted annually from any nation was reduced to [#].

1924; 16; 155,000

In [YEAR], Madison Grant, Chair of the New York Zoological Society and prominent leader of the IRL, published his best-selling The Passing of the Great Race, which extolled the virtues of “Nordic” (Northern) peoples of Europe while cataloging the supposed vices of “Mediterranean” (Southern) peoples.

1916

Inspired by Grant, T. L. Stoppard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy in [YEAR], which argued that the war had unsettled the historical dominance of European nations and paved the way for a future of Asian domination.

1920

During World War I, the psychologist Robert M. Yerkes administered a series of intelligence tests to millions of recruits at U.S. Army induction centers in [YEAR].

1918

Disaggregating the data, which indicated an average mental age of [#] for White Americans, Yerkes argued that the scores of African Americans and immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews, fell far below this average.

13

At the time, however, Yerkes’s conclusions were taken as objective scientific facts, and his testing data figured prominently in the Congressional hearings on the [YEAR] Immigration Act.

1924

The American Eugenics Society, which was co-founded by Grant and other like-minded scientists like H. H. Loughlin in [YEAR], exerted tremendous influence.

1922

Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act of [YEAR], for example, authorized the involuntary sterilization of inmates of state asylums judged to be afflicted with “idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, or epilepsy.”

1924

Carrie Buck, an [#]-year-old woman committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded after giving birth to a child out of wedlock, appealed the state’s sterilization order in [MONTH, YEAR].

18; Nov, 1924

Experts testified that Buck’s mother Emma, who [#] years earlier had been committed by the state to the same institution, was a “low-grade moron” and that Carrie Buck was “obviously feeble-minded” and sexually promiscuous.

4

A subsequent appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of [YEAR].

1927

“[#] generations of imbeciles are enough.”

3

The decision paved the way for Virginia and [#] other states to legally carry out almost [#] involuntary sterilizations over the next decade.

7; 28,000

Eugenics also spurred Virginia legislators to pass the Racial Integrity Act of [YEAR], which made it illegal for whites to marry anyone classified as “non-white.”

1924

This interracial marriage ban remained on the books until [YEAR], when it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

1967

Virginia’s eugenics-inspired laws also served as a model for Nazi Germany’s notorious Nuremberg laws of the [PART-DECADE], which targeted Jews and other ethnic minorities and paved the way for the Holocaust.

mid-1930s

Few images are more closely associated with the [DECADE] than that of the “flapper.”

1920s

In the [DECADE], a new generation of women broke free from many of the traditional Victorian gender norms.

1920s

The flapper style emerged in the post-war years, gradually displacing the Gibson Girl in the popular imagination as the vanguard of women’s fashion by [YEAR].

1925

According to a [YEAR] survey, [#] percent of American women over [#] used perfume, [#] percent used face powder, and [#] percent used rouge.

1927; 73; 18; 90; 50

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the literary bard of the [DECADE] whose free-spirited, hard-living wife Zelda served as the archetypical flapper, titled his [YEAR] book of short stories Flappers and Philosophers.

1920s; 1925

By [YEAR], as “talkies” took over movie theaters, the sultry “it girl” Clara Bow replaced the demure, curly-locked Mary Pickford as Hollywood’s brightest starlet.

1927

“To bring the flapper to terms, approve of her,” suggested Outlook in the [SEASON] of [YEAR], “then she’ll stop it.”

fall; 1922

In the [DECADE], “petting” and “necking” parties were all the rage at high schools and college campuses, whose female to male ratio had risen considerably.

1920s

[#] in [#] marriages in the [DECADE] ended in divorce, although remarriage rates remained high.

1; 6; 1920s

In [YEAR] Ben Lindsay, a progressive Juvenile Court Judge in Denver, published Revolt of Modern Youth.

1925

By slashing its residency requirement, offering [#] grounds for divorce, and eliminating waiting periods, the Nevada State Legislature helped make the city of Reno the divorce capital of the United States.

9

Steady paychecks made women a crucial part of the booming consumer economy; one estimate put women’s annual spending on consumer purchases at $[#] annually.

29.3 billion

In [YEAR], The North American Review estimated that women controlled [#] percent of the nation’s spending on everything from daily necessities to leisure and luxury items.

1929; 85

By [YEAR], just over [#] in [#] American women over the age of [#] ([#] percent) worked outside of the home, up from [#] in [#] ([#] percent) at the beginning of the [CENTURY].

1930; 1; 4; 16; 25.3; 1; 5; 20.6; 20th

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the percentage of married working women had nearly doubled from [#] to [#] percent.

15; 29

Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of women, [#] percent according to one historian, left the workforce when they married.

90

The Lynds found that in Muncie, [#] of the [#] working-class wives worked outside of the home at some point during their [#]-year study (1921−24).

55; 124; 4

Women did make huge gains in so-called “pink collar” or “lace collar” clerical and secretarial office jobs, which accounted for [#] percent of female employment by the end of the [DECADE].

19; 1920s

In [YEAR], only three percent of working women were lawyers, and only [#] percent were doctors.

1930; 4.4

The daughter of a sharecropper in rural North Carolina remembered her mother taking her and her siblings out to pick cotton by lantern light, even in the rain or sleet, past [TIME].

9:00 pm

In the [DECADE], a new generation carried its burning embers across the Atlantic to the “City of Light,” where they reignited a new free-spirited bohemianism with Parisian joie de vivre.

1920s

Disillusioned by the war’s brutality and the moral bankruptcy of American consumer culture, a cohort of young American intellectuals moved to Europe in the [DECADE], with many settling, at least temporarily, in unheated studio apartments or inexpensive small hotels that dotted the [ORDINAL] and [ORDINAL] Arrondissements on the Left Bank of the Seine.

1920s; 5th; 6th

By [YEAR], [#] Americans were living in Paris, prompting one expat writer to remark that life in the French capital was indistinguishable from New York, “except for the fact some people stubbornly persisted in talking French.”

1924; 32,000

Hemingway’s stripped-down, lean prose style in works like The Sun Also Rises ([YEAR]) captured the mood of the era, while Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ([YEAR]) critiqued the excesses of the American Dream.

1926; 1925

Cummings, who even defied convention in the writing of his name, produced stanzas of pure nonsense—“@[#]/[#]%&:[FRACTION]?@[FRACTION]”—that resemble an automatically generated password as an act of artistic defiance in line with the iconoclastic anti-rational Dadaist movement in Europe and the popularization of Freudian psychology (discussed in detail shortly).

1; 4; 1/4; 3/4

The cubist style of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, a frequent attendee of Stein’s Paris salon in the [DECADE], eschewed realism to produce fragmented images featuring sharp geometric shapes and bold colors.

1920s

In architecture, the decade closed with the construction of skyscrapers like New York City’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, completed in [YEAR] and [YEAR], respectively, that would stand as monuments to the Art Deco movement.

1930; 1931

One of the most profound developments of the [DECADE] was the explosion of African-American artistic and intellectual production.

1920s

A veritable “who’s who” of Black America in the [DECADE] called Harlem home.

1920s

The father of the New Negro Movement was the philosopher and Howard University professor Alaine Locke, who curated and contributed to a [YEAR] collection of poems, essays, and fiction entitled The New Negro that lent its name to the wider phenomenon.

1925

The famous Viennese father of psychoanalysis spent a fleeting [#] weeks total in the United States in the [SEASON] of [YEAR] and left unimpressed with America’s crass materialism.

2; fall; 1909

For their part, most American psychologists and sociologists treated psychoanalysis as unscientific and methodologically flawed prior to [YEAR].

1920

Freud permeated American culture in the [DECADE] to the extent that it was entirely possible for educated Americans to gain a passing familiarity with some of Freud’s most famous ideas without ever having read his work.

1920s

It was possible, many intellectuals in the [DECADE] believed, to draw a straight line from these stern moralistic colonials to the religious zealots of their own time who had banned alcohol, jazz music, and Darwin.

1920s

Krutch’s Modern Temper, which offered a trenchant critique of the scientific and secularized society in [YEAR], analogized the United States in the [DECADE] to an adolescent struggling with an existential identity crisis.

1927; 1920s

In Chicago in [YEAR], a shocking crime committed by teenagers introduced psychiatry into the courtroom in new ways.

1924

On the evening of [MONTH DAY, YEAR], the parents of Bobby Franks began to worry when their [#]-year-old son failed to return home hours after the school day had ended.

May 21, 1924; 14