History Curriculum/Book 23

Book twenty-three of the curriculum

The History of the Roaring 1920s

The twenty-third book in the curriculum and the fifth of the Late American History set. Sixteen chapters across four weeks — first the road into the decade: the world after the First World War, the Red Scare of 1919–1920, the changing American economy, and health, leisure and everyday life before Prohibition; then culture and social change: jazz and radio, the Harlem Renaissance, women's new vote and new roles, and the sports stars and films of the decade; then the conflicts beneath the prosperity: Prohibition and the gangs, the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924, the Ku Klux Klan as the hearings, courts and newspapers of the time recorded it, and the Scopes trial; and last the end of the decade: the stock market boom, the farmers' and workers' struggles, the crash of October 1929, and what the decade left behind. TWO THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START. First, the first-person accounts in both printed editions are HISTORICAL FICTION — written to tell the story, informed by the surviving record, and not the words of the people named. Most narrators are real people, but some speak of things that happened after they died, and some meet in conversations that never took place. The record itself is large: the amendments and statutes, the presidents' messages, the court records and verdicts, the hearings of Congress, the census and the Federal Reserve's reports, the newspapers and magazines, and the recordings, films and photographs of the decade — and this course quotes them. Second, at the back of the Ultimate Guide, after the chapters (pages 309–357), there are Cross-Curricular sections — Math, Science, English and Social Studies — and three exams with their keys, to use alongside this course. They are not a fifth week and there is nothing to hand in for them.