1920's

Propaganda

information, often biased or misleading in nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view

Great Migration

movement of over 300,000 African American from the rural South to cities in the North between 1914 and 1920

Nativism

Discrimination against immigrants

Isolationism

foreign policy of avoiding involvement in world affairs

Communism

political-economic ideology calling for social and economic justice for the working classes; calls for the redistribution of wealth from the upper and middle classes through state ownership and management of property of behalf of all workers

Anarchism

political philosophy that opposes government in any form

Sacco and Vanzetti

Italian immigrants with radical political beliefs executed in 1927 for murdering a guard during an armed robbery; believed by many to have been innocent

Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924

laws that decreased immigration, especially Italians, Eastern European Jews and Slavs, and Asians, by establishing annual quotas for the number of immigrants allowed into the US from each country

Prohibition

Eighteenth Amendment ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages

Speakeasies

illegal bars during Prohibition

Bootleggers

People who produced, smuggled, or sold alcoholic beverages illegally during the era of Prohibition

Al Capone

Chicago gangster who controlled bootlegging, speakeasies, and prostitution rings until his arrest for tax evasion in 1931

Flappers

young women who wore bobbed hair, heavy makeup, and short skirts and defied traditional social conventions

Henry Ford

automobile manufacturer who pioneered assembly-line mass production

Birth of a Nation

Controversial but highly influential and innovative silent film directed by D.W. Griffith. It demonstrated the power of film propaganda and revived the KKK.

Harlem Renaissance

period in the 1920s-1930s when African-American achievements in art, music, and literature flourished

Louis Armstrong

aka Satchmo; popular pioneering jazz trumpeter and scat singer

Duke Ellington

influential jazz pianist and bandleader at Harlem's Cotton Club

Bessie Smith

singer known as the Empress of the Blues

Langston Hughes

leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance; wrote "Dreams", "I, Too", and "Let America Be America Again"

Zora Neale Hurston

leading author of the Harlem Renaissance influenced by black folklore of the American South and the Caribbean; wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Marcus Garvey

Jamaican-American black nationalist and leader of the Back-to-Africa movement who wanted to liberate Africa from European colonialism