The Roaring Twenties Study Guide

Directions: On a separate sheet of paper, answer the following questions in short form.

1. Was the decade of the twenties prosperous for the United States as a whole? 2. What factors led many American observers to refer to the 1920s as the “roaring twenties”? 3. What four factors challenged traditional values? 4. When and where did radio broadcasts begin? 5. What percentage of American homes owned radios by 1929? 6. What did radio advertising create? 7. How did the broadcast of jazz by radio affect this new style of music? 8. Identify the “Fireside Chats” of the 1930s. 9. For what purpose did President Franklin Roosevelt use “Fireside Chats”? 10. What became a major new form of entertainment in America during the decade of the twenties? 11. When did movies gain sound, and what was the first talking picture? 12. Name four national stars created by the movies. 13. What did films provide the American people during the Depression? 14. What two print media influenced American popular culture during the twenties and thirties? 15. What three magazines appealed to a general middle class audience? 16. What were two fads of the 1920s? 17. What brought immense social change to the United States during the twenties? 18. What type of values did many of the social changes challenge during the 1920s? 19. What resulted from the challenges to traditional American values? 20. What was one major cause of social conflict? 21. What did Darwin’s theory of evolution challenge? 22. What does the word evolution mean? 23. To what does the term evolution refer in biology? 24. Who was Charles Darwin? 25. What book did Darwin publish, and what idea did this book propose? 26. What was the focus of Darwin’s concept of natural selection? 27. By the 1920s, how did many Christians in rural America view Darwin’s theory of evolution? 28. What law did the Tennessee legislature pass in 1925? 29. Who was John Scopes, and what did he do? 30. What was the result of the Scopes trial? 31. Who else challenged traditional American values during the 1920s? 32. What had been the traditional role of women in 19th century Victorian America? 33. What did the 19th Amendment do? 34. In what presidential election were all American women eligible to vote? 35. For what did the flappers become a symbol? 36. Define the term flapper. 37. How did the youthful flapper affect American traditionalists? 38. Where did flappers publicly express their sexuality? 39. Describe the flappers. 40. What did the 18th Amendment do? 41. Why had Protestant reformers crusaded for ratification of the 18th Amendment? 42. The 18th Amendment was an achievement of what reform movement? 43. What were three unintended consequences of Prohibition? 44. What did gangsters establish with the profits they made from the sale of illegal liquor?

1 45. What were “speakeasies”? 46. When was Prohibition repealed? 47. What feeling developed among many native-born Americans in the decade of the twenties? 48. What factors caused native-born Americans to develop this anti-immigrant feeling? 49. What organization revived after World War I largely as a result of opposition to immigration? 50. How was the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties different from the KKK during Reconstruction? 51. What did the Klan claim to do? 52. Who did the Ku Klux Klan blame for many of America’s problems? 53. How did Congress bow (give in) to anti-immigrant feeling during the 1920s? 54. What did the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 do? 55. What are quotas? 56. What groups were particularly targeted by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921? 57. What did the 1924 federal immigration law do? 58. For how long did these immigration laws effectively cut off most European immigration? 59. Did the 1924 immigration law restrict immigration from Canada or Latin America?